This blog post title is taken from an iteration of the constantly-changing prospectus for my forthcoming novel All These Bitches is My Sons. If you are, for some reason, able to read the prospectus in its entirety without your brain exploding, you will see that All These Bitches is My Sons is more than just a novel and the industry leader of viral data hygiene. Sometimes it is also the industry leader of B2C one-to-one re-sizing and sometimes it also practically invented the term “CAD”. The fact that you get a completely new prospectus every time you refresh the page just goes to show how dynamic and fluid this novel is going to be. It’s just how we do.
So much shawking shawking news! Bryan Adams concert in India! ZOMG!!! That has never EVER happened before! Do you think he’ll sing Summer of ’69? Even though it’s 2011? Does anyone know why he keeps coming here? Also, Raja was arrested! It’s almost like he did something bad or something! Shawking!
Now I will put these exclamation marks to better use and say RuPaul! Season 3! Episode 3! Drag Queens in Outer Space! Why hasn’t someone made this movie yet? Seriously, we had lesbian vampire killers but no drag queens in space, it makes no kinda sense!! Ok, my fav lines from this ‘sode were
Well. Glad you’re still here Curly.
(k- Ok, the line isn’t that amazing but when Manila said this it kinda sounded like she was saying Kuzhali and I was like !!!!! Only she was saying Curly and she was saying it to Shangela and Shangela was like bish, please. It kind of sounded like Kuzhali. Kinda.)
Delta knows how many cab drivers I’ve slept with, Delta knows all kinds of shit.
Tweaker? The She Monkey? That’s haut.
Do not make fake sound effect gun noises.
(k- general rule I think. Just anywhere, fake gun noises. No.)
The idea of having Michelle Visage sitting there terrifies me a little bit because that woman scares me.
Lily motherfucking Tomlin.
(k- I KNOW!!!)
And while not technically a line, this little bit of conversation that happened while they were doing rehearsals was very swish because they were about to do the scene so someone said ‘Action!’ and then this happened.
‘Say what?’
‘Action?’
‘Oh’.
What else means PETA did an ad which apparently features a range of women fellating vegetables. I feel like this is the right time to confess that the only reason I am not a vegetarian is because PETA has not done an ad featuring haut dudes fucking melons. Make it happen PETA!!!
Then, my contributor’s copy of Pank 5 arrived to my little corner of existence and that is always a triumph when things like that happen. If you’re sitting there with thirteen American dollars and wondering hmm, what I can do with this thirteen American dollars maybe you can buy one number copy. Not only is it filled with writers who are phamous in other countries, it has some kind of illustrated dead bear on the cover and a bus and fire. If I had thirteen American dollars, I’d buy it for the cover alone.
Also, Lapata interviewed me at Chapati Mystery and painted a picture of me also and also included my louly ‘you mad!’ dancing dude as well, which is very yes. Did you know he dances like an awesome to ‘show me your jalwa’? I feel like the haters need to know this and if you know this and keep hating anyway then I don’t know what to say. You must be carrying a great sadness around with you if you keep hating after seeing the ‘you mad!’ dude dance to ‘show me your jalwa’.
Then after somehow managing to listen through the novel Moby Dick, I made the unfortunate decision to listen to The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett. And while I can appreciate the book for what it is, I can’t help but feel like it would have been vastly improved if the garden had eaten all the children in the end. Or the children had eaten the garden. I guess maybe the latter, considering they were eating so much of everything else during a large portion of the book. Anyhoo, I am pleased to say that I was able to make up for things with two veryexcellent short story collections which I feel are totally worth reading/listening to again and again.
Dubliners by James Joyce– One reader actually sings at one point and another makes sounds like a cork popping. Which is rad.
A Man of Means by P. G. Wodehouse and C. H. Bovill – The reader does not sing or make cork popping noises but we don’t judge him because that’s not how we do.
And then, while trawling the internet to find stuff to read about Egypt, I came across this post called A Guide: How Not To Say Stupid Stuff About Egypt. I found this very helpful because while I am not an authority on Egypt or the situation there, I kept reading stuff that made me feel like something was not quite right in the way some things were being said. Coming across these kinds of guides when dealing with Othering in fiction is inevitable. Someone writes something idiotic (which happens a lot and frankly, there’s not enough guides happening), someone else gets riled up about it and they write a guide because really, that’s about all you can do about Othering. It’s a very lucrative gig and also if you call people out on it, that means you’re racist and sitting on the neck of their artistic freedom. Or something. I don’t really understand that part.
These guides also often happen in response to certain kinds of travelogues which are also basically fiction and which are also popular because of the Othering factor. My Trip To Canada? Meh. My Trip To Africa! YES PLEASE! Tell us all about how the tribal people danced with lions and elephants and how they made you king of their village after you showed them your cell phone!!! I feel like Canada really misses out because it has no tribal people dancing with lions and elephants. They do have Nanaimo bars though. Anyway.
And now we have a guide for the situation in Egypt, which I think means that at some level, Othering is rearing its awesome head here as well. If when listening to what the Egyptian people are saying, some folk are only coming away with the revelation that ‘Egyptian people are so articulate’, it seems to imply that what they’re actually saying is being lost in the astonishment that the Egyptians can speak at all. And to say ‘duh of course they can speak, what’s wrong with you?’ is for some reason racist and like, so mean and stuff like that. I don’t really understand that either. So many things I don’t understand.
I think the need for the guide arose because possibly for the first time evar, Egypt is being discussed in terms that don’t involve The Mummy and My Awesome Egyptian Vacay! And while I cannot speak of Egypt, I feel like I can speak about the other things that Egypt has taught me.
A large number of people do not want to actually understand what is happening in Egypt. They just want to get all emo on Twitter. (in case you DO want to educate yourself, maybe you can start with this helpful post at the disquiet blog. but it’s way easier not to read anything at all and just get emo on Twitter. seriously.)
The incidents in Egypt have helped an enormous number of people realize things like the women are brave and the people are nice and these are totally relevant things to say right now because they are not generalizing and sweeping statements at all. Perhaps most shawking of all, Egyptians actually do not go around ‘walking like an Egyptian’.
People who are ‘progressive’ and awesome because they got dysentery one time when they went to Mexico cannot technically say fuckwitted things about Egypt because this one time, they got dysentery when they went to Mexico and Mexico is like Egypt. If you feel what they say is fuckwitted, it’s because you never got dysentery in Mexico.
People who are totally not in Egypt are like really upset. We can know this because they keep saying things like ‘I’m so upset about what’s happening in Egypt. I just can’t deal with it. Why can’t they just stop! It’s all too much for me, I can’t bear it! Make them stop! They’re upsetting me!!!!!’ I’m sure the Egyptians are real sorry and wouldn’t have gone all revolutiony if they had known you’d get so upset.
‘Walk Like an Egyptian’, a song with lines like ‘foreign types with the hookah pipes’ is somehow the unofficial anthem for the ‘Egyptian Revolution’ because…well you know, they are both about Egypt and Egyptians walk but as was pointed out earlier, not like how we thought they walked. And it’s always important to appoint other people’s anthems for other people’s revolutions. I feel like Egypt Rani from the movie Narasimha is a better choice because at one point, the woman is called a ‘ganja poonthottam’ which I believe sloppily translates as ‘marijuana flower garden’.
And now, mashups.
okbai.