Book of Jokes: video preview 2

[imomus]

So I'm writing this long fiction called The Book of Jokes, right. Basically it's the story of the world's most dysfunctional family -- a family defined by some of the world's darkest jokes. It'll be published by La Volte in September 2008, initially in French. Over the next months I'm doing a series of readings of excerpts of the book (unedited drafts, basically) on a YouTube channel called bookofjokes. Here's the second reading, a chunk of Chapter Two concerning my father's affair with a barnyard fowl.

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Disclaimer: This material is dark and filthy and sick and deranged. Any resemblance to persons -- or barnyard fowl -- living or dead is a joke, mate.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

気持ち悪い！

[(Anonymous)]

It's all too shaggy dog for its own good, I'm afraid. And have you thought of the poor translator? What's the French for 'slithering trouser snake'?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

The structure isn't novel-like, it's modelled on collections of stories like The Decameron, The 1001 Nights and The Canterbury Tales -- tales told within a conceptual frame (a pilgrimage, aristocrats hiding from the plague, and so on).

The frame in my case is basically a kunstlerbildungsroman -- the family memories of a young man who later became an artist... or perhaps the world's biggest liar! Into this "my family" structure are fitted jokes -- as shabby and sexual as you like. You'll have to take my word for it that as the stories accumulate, and all relate to the same family, the whole thing gets funnier.

You also have to understand that the incest and promiscuity on show turns out to be an incest and promiscuity of narratives -- stories which are designed to stand alone being forced into families, and the absurdities which develop when the comic is replayed in the mode of the tragic.

[ofenheizung.livejournal.com]

Fantastic. And good show getting it published in Paris first. A fine tradition, that.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

The girls say hi.

[sofahead.livejournal.com]

Ah, that was great. I look forward to reading what else you've come up with.

A liittle late but ,ahem!

[pay-option07.livejournal.com]

The thrill of literary dis or intercourse.
I'm imagining a female language teacher in Japan reading this to a classroom of thirteen, fourteenish girls and boys.

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

Your Vice is my Plastic Little. Yo, Philly!

http://www.shesmature.com/