He often said he had to be a writer because he wasn’t good at anything else. He was not good at being an employee. Back in the mid-1950s, he was employed by Sports Illustrated, briefly. He reported to work, was asked to write a short piece on a racehorse that had jumped over a fence and tried to run away. Kurt stared at the blank piece of paper all morning and then typed, “The horse jumped over the fucking fence,” and walked out, self-employed again.

I looked in the SI Vault and couldn’t find anything written by Vonnegut, but this anecdote is reported widely around the web.

Maybe there will be more evidence at the memorial library opening soon in Indy.

Via Brian Sample

Tell us how you really feel, Bret.

Question: David Foster Wallace – as an American writer, what is your opinion now that he has died?

Answer: Is it too soon? It’s too soon right? Well I don’t rate him. The journalism is pedestrian, the stories scattered and full of that Mid-Western faux-sentimentality and Infinite Jest is unreadable. His life story and his battle with depression however is really quite touching…

Now this is how you hold a grudge, people. Wait until someone dies and then respond to a jab from 17 years earlier! DFW on American Psycho in 1993:

DFW: …You can see this clearly in something like Ellis’s “American Psycho”: it panders shamelessly to the audience’s sadism for a while, but by the end it’s clear that the sadism’s real object is the reader herself.

LM: But at least in the case of “American Psycho” I felt there was something more than just this desire to inflict pain—or that Ellis was being cruel the way you said serious artists need to be willing to be.

DFW: You’re just displaying the sort of cynicism that lets readers be manipulated by bad writing. I think it’s a kind of black cynicism about today’s world that Ellis and certain others depend on for their readership. Look, if the contemporary condition is hopelessly shitty, insipid, materialistic, emotionally retarded, sadomasochistic, and stupid, then I (or any writer) can get away with slapping together stories with characters who are stupid, vapid, emotionally retarded, which is easy, because these sorts of characters require no development. With descriptions that are simply lists of brand-name consumer products. Where stupid people say insipid stuff to each other. If what’s always distinguished bad writing—flat characters, a narrative world that’s cliched and not recognizably human, etc.—is also a description of today’s world, then bad writing becomes an ingenious mimesis of a bad world. If readers simply believe the world is stupid and shallow and mean, then Ellis can write a mean shallow stupid novel that becomes a mordant deadpan commentary on the badness of everything. Look man, we’d probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is? In dark times, the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of what’s human and magical that still live and glow despite the times’ darkness. Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it’d find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it. You can defend “Psycho” as being a sort of performative digest of late-eighties social problems, but it’s no more than that.

Via Sagatrope

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There’s this nifty tool floating around the internet the last couple days called I Write Like. You put a couple paragraphs into a box, click submit, and get the name of a famous author that you write like. I was wondering how good it was, so I spent a couple hours putting in some paragraphs of famous authors to see what I Write Like would come up with.

The results were mixed. A lot of these writers write like David Foster Wallace even if David Foster Wallace writes like Ian Fleming. I found the Project Gutenberg website with the top 100 ebooks and I Write Like did pretty well with the first couple paragraphs with most of those authors. In any case, I Write Like nailed 14 of the 30 classic authors giving it a success rate of 47%. For what it’s worth, Jersey Shore Nickname Generator is accurate 94% of the time. Note: The tool is fun. This isn’t a fair test.

James Joyce – The Dubliners is like James Joyce.
Stephen King – The Gingerbread Girl is like Dan Brown or William Gibson depending how many paragraphs you take.
William Gibson – Neuromancer is like David Foster Wallace.
David Foster Wallace – Consider the Lobster is like Ian Fleming.
Mark Twain – Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is like Mark Twain.
Ambrose Bierce – An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge is like Robert Louis Stephenson. This is my favorite short story, by the way.
William Faulkner – A Rose for Emily is like Margaret Mitchell.
Ernest Hemingway – Hills Like White Elephants is like Ian Fleming. I was pretty sure this one would be right.
F. Scott Fitzgerald – The Diamond as Big as the Ritz is like H.P. Lovecraft.
H. P. Lovecraft – At the Mountains of Madness is like Edgar Allan Poe.
Edgar Allan Poe – The Angel of the Odd is like David Foster Wallace.
J.D. Salinger – For Esmé – with Love and Squalor is like Arthur Conan Doyle.
Arthur Conan Doyle – The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes is like Arthur Conan Doyle.
Franz Kafka – Metamorphosis is like James Joyce.
Treasure Island – Robert Louis Stevenson is like Robert Louis Stevenson.
William Shakespeare – Hamlet is like William Shakespeare.
Jane Austen – Pride and Prejudice is like Jane Austen.
Lewis Carroll – Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is like Lewis Carroll.
Alexandre Dumas – The Count of Monte Cristo is like Charles Dickens.
Charles Dickens – A Tale of Two Cities is like Charles Dickens.
Bram Stoker – Dracula is like Bram Stoker.
H. G. Wells – The War of the Worlds, by is like H.G. Wells.
Emily Bronte – Wuthering Heights is like Daniel Defoe.
Agata Christie – The Secret Adversary is like Agatha Christie.
Beatrix Potter – Peter Rabbit is like Arthur Conan Doyle.
Herman Melville – Moby Dick; Or the Whale is like Robert Louis Stevenson.
Mary Shelley – Frankenstein is like Mary Shelley.
Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy is like Leo Tolstoy.
Homer – The Iliad is like William Shakespeare.
Kurt Vonnegut – Cat’s Cradle is like Kurt Vonnegut.

Then, in the interest of pandering, I thought I’d look up a few contemporary writers/websites I like:
Jason Kottke is like (this surprises no one) David Foster Wallace.
The Daily What is like Stephen King.
John Gruber / Daring Fireball is like Stephen King.
Andy Baio / Waxy.org is like James Joyce.
Michael Lewis is like David Foster Wallace.
Chuck Klosterman is like Kurt Vonegut.
Bill Simmons is like Stephen King.

Now some pop culture folks:
Tracy Jordan is like James Joyce.
Don Draper’s slide projector monologue is like Margaret Atwood.
The Real Shaq on Twitter is like Dan Brown.
Britney Spears on Twitter is like Dan Brown. (Probably because he uses web addresses in his writing?)
Britney Spears – Oops…I Did it Again is like Stephanie Meyer.
Jawbreaker – Kiss the Bottle is like David Foster Wallace.
Anthony Bourdain is like Dan Brown.

For what it’s worth, when you put this post through the tool, it’s like H.P. Lovecraft. Who did we leave out? Post your finds in the comments.

It says here that Brad Pitt has optioned The Big Short. As loyal readers, you’ll know that I’ve been using the platform of Unlikely Words for several years to advocate for a movie based on Liar’s Poker. Actually The Big Short and Liar’s Poker could be released together as a part 1 and part 2 of the financial collapse. Shia Labeouf could play a young Michael Lewis.

Pitt’s Plan B productions is going full steam ahead on an adaptation of Lewis’ latest, “The Big Short,” about the events that led up to the current financial fiasco. They’re set offer Charles Randolph (”The Interpreter,” “The Life of David Gale”) $750G to write a script, reported New York mag’s Vulture.

Every couple months or so, I do a little Googling to see if Liar’s Poker has been optioned yet. Turns out it was optioned 20 years ago. Make the fucking movie already.

A few more Michael Lewis links to round out the day:
Complete Guide To Who’s Who In The CDO Scandal
Goldman Sachs Is Doomed

On Oaths

We pledge to meet and even get to know ordinary people who do not work for Goldman Sachs, so that we might better understand their irrational behavior, and exploit it only when necessary.

These are not movies you want to watch, these Nicolas Sparks books made into movies. And yet, they keep getting made. NPR imagined what would happen if 10 popular movies were written by Nicolas Sparks.

1. The Karate Kid: At the tournament, Daniel admits to Mr. Miyagi that he has been concealing the kneecap cancer that makes the crane kick so useful to him. Daniel wins the tournament, but then collapses on the mat dead. “Get him a body bag,” says a Cobra Kai sadly. Daniel is carried out of the arena by a processional of Cobra Kai on one side and repeatedly bullied weaklings on the other. As he exits, Johnny says wistfully to his corpse, “You’re all right, LaRusso. You’re all right.” The movie ends with a slow piano cover of “Cruel Summer.”

Via bookshelves of doom

After getting captured by German soldiers, made into a POW, and then being abandoned by the German prison guards (the bombing of Dresden was in there somewhere, too) Kurt Vonnegut wrote a letter home. I always wonder if these guys know they’re writing for future audiences, and how lucky his family kept the letter… The refrain of “But not me” in the letter obviously reminds me of “so it goes” from Slaughterhouse 5, which, of course, is based on the aforementioned experience.

Via Daring Fireball

Looks like Brad Pitt’s production company is about to option another Michael Lewis book. One that hasn’t even come out yet.

Plan B Entertainment, is closing on a deal to option Lewis’s next book, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, a chronicle of Wall Street greed and the swollen U.S. housing market. Pitt is also considering starring.

I swear if someone doesn’t start making a movie about Liar’s Poker soon, I’m going to start typing in all caps. And I’ll mean it, too. The fact that it’s not a movie yet makes me itchy.

I think I read Catcher in the Rye for the first time in…crap, I have no idea when, it was a long time ago. Ever since, I’ve remembered Holden referring to his roommate’s ‘mossy teeth’ in this quote. And every time I use this descriptor, no one knows what I’m talking about. So, if we’re ever talking and I bring up mossy teeth, this is what I’m referring to:

He started cleaning his goddam fingernails with the end of a match. He was always cleaning his fingernails. It was funny, in a way. His teeth were always mossy-looking, and his ears were always dirty as hell, but he was always cleaning his fingernails. I guess he thought that made him a very neat guy. He took another look at my hat while he was cleaning them. “Up home we wear a hat like that to shoot deer in, for Chrissake,” he said. “That’s a deer shooting hat.”
“Like hell it is.” I took it off and looked at it. I sort of closed one eye, like I was taking aim at it. “This is a people shooting hat,” I said. “I shoot people in this hat.”

Also, I didn’t know Chinese Democracy had a song called Catcher in the Rye, did you?

The Omnivoracious blog on Amazon compared their year end top 100 books list, with the New York Times 100 Notable Books and Publishers Weekly’s Best Books of 2009 to get a composite of the best books of 2009. There were 11 books that were on all 3 lists this year, plus 2 that were not on the Notable 100, but were on other NY Times lists. For what it’s worth, there were 13 last year and 11 in 2007. No women authors made the cut, only 2 novels, and 2 graphic novels.

Asterios Polyp by David Mazzucchelli
Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon
Sag Harbor by Colson Whitehead
The Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes
Born Round by Frank Bruni
Cheever by Blake Bailey
Columbine by Dave Cullen
Fordlandia by Greg Grandin
The Good Soldiers by David Finkel
The Lost City of Z by David Grann
Shop Class as Soulcraft by Matthew Crawford
Momofuku by David Chang and Peter Meehan (not in NYT’s 100 Notable, but in their best cookbooks list)
The Jazz Loft Project by Sam Stephenson (not in NYT’s 100 Notable, but in their Gift Books list)

Hearing how Chuck Klosterman’s voice sounds on Bill Simmons’ podcasts makes it a little more awesome to read this book. I thought the premise tying this book together was unnecessary, as Spin could have just sent Klosterman on a road trip. It’s worth reading even if I don’t know whether to pronounce Klosterman as Close-terman or Claws-terman.