It can best be described as a stunning piece of experimental metafiction. What if a rote, ghost-written political memoir by a second-place vice presidential candidate was penned by a Faulknerian unreliable narrator? It's like The Turn of the Screw, only the ghost is Steve Schmidt. Our protagonist, "Sarah Palin," deliberately withholds and exaggerates, even dropping into italicized internal monologue to signify that a real whooper's on the way.

Palin's grasp of American dialect is more S.E. Hinton than Twain, of course (while occasionally stunning in its experimental ambition, it is her first published work). But what it occasionally lacks in conversational verisimilitude ("a big darn deal"?) it usually makes up for in unexpected humor. Here she is describing the moment when "Sarah Palin" first learns that she's "pregnant" with the mysterious talisman "Trig":

Slowly a pink image materialized on the stick. Holy geez!

"Trig" inspires this delightfully batty biblical allusion:

Yes Lord, I thought. My name is Sarah, but my husband isn't Abraham. His name is Todd!

Did Todd offer Sarah to the Pharaoh and come away with rewards and riches? When Todd asked for another son, did Sarah offer him her handmaiden, Meg Stapleton? So many questions!

Every so often, the tone abruptly (and cleverly) switches to a savage parody of the pretentious poetics that the sort of person who'd attempt them would call "high-falutin.'" Kakutani highlights a winner from the first page (didn't finish before your deadline, Michiko?)

I breathed in an autumn bouquet that combined everything small-town America with rugged splashes of the Last Frontier.

Exposing the useless charade of an loser would-be Veep expounding on history and foreign policy (as if anyone cared! as if we believed they came up with their insights on their own!) Going Rogue presents a 15-year-old high school basketball team captain's thoughts on the Iran Hostage Crisis, and what it revealed about leadership:

I had followed the Iran hostage crisis and remember wondering why President Jimmy Carter didn't act more decisively. From my high schooler's perspective, I thought the question was, Why did he allow America to be humiliated and pushed around? The new president being sworn in radiated confidence and optimism. The enemies of freedom took notice. In years to come people would ask, What did he have that Carter didn't? To me the answer was obvious. He had a steel spine.

She uses the Dan Rathermism "high on the hog" and complains of being called a demeaning term for the lower classes that she wears with pride:

"My family was made to look like a herd of hillbillies who had come to the big city and started living high on the hog, and that hurt me for them."

"And that hurt me for them." Brilliant.

In this bravura passage, "Palin" complains that a fat man told her to eat well.

He then launched into a discussion of nutrition physiology, holding forth on the importance of carbohydrates to cognitive connections and blah-blah-blah. As he lectured, I took in his rotund physique and noted that he used nicotine to keep his own cognitive connections humming along.

I interrupted his lecture. "Steve, you know what I really need? Half an hour to go for a run in these beautiful cities we're visiting. Also, seeing my kids does wonders for my soul."

He barreled on as if I hadn't spoken. "Headquarters is flying in a nutritionist, and for three days you're going to be on a diet balanced in carbohydrates and nitrates and —"

I'm a forty-four year old, healthy, athletic woman raising five kids and governing a large state, I thought as his words faded into a background buzz. Sir, I really don't know you yet. But you've told me how to dress, what to say, who to talk to, a lot of people not to talk to, who my heroes are supposed to be and we're still losing. Now you're going to tell me what to eat?

A fat smoker told "Sarah Palin" to eat a balanced diet and that made her mad. We cannot recommend this book highly enough. And you can get it for free!

Page scans via Celtic Diva, Wonkette.

Oh, and PS: It turns out that Sarah Palin talks like that because of Government Socialism. Seriously! Alaska's Mat-Stu valley region was populated by upper midwestern farmers relocated to Alaska as part of a New Deal agricultural program. This was basically exactly the sort of thing Stalin would do, and though most of those 200 Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan families who were resettled in Alaska to farm hated it immensely and eventually left, they left behind a legacy of talking like a goober. (Palin also has a western influence in her accent, because her family is from Idaho. And also, obviously, she talks like even more of a goober when she is on television trying to prove that she is as much of a reactionary moron as the reactionary morons she is trying to appeal to. We all know Real Americans don't fully pronounce the suffixes of present participles, etc. etc..)

But that is probably not all of it, as that financial disclosure only covers the period before she suddenly resigned as governor of the Alaska.

Still: a lot of money!

What is weirder, though, in her financial disclosure: last April Sarah Palin created a company called "Pie Spy." No one knows what this company does. Just that it is called "Pie Spy," and it is a "marketing" company. And:

It is listed with a North American Industry Classification System code corresponding to companies that provide services to the elderly or to people with disabilities.

But no one will say anything about this "Pie Spy" company that markets secret pies to crippled old people! What does it mean?

Yesterday, Rushdie's ex-fling Pia Glenn told the Post that Rushdie "talk[ed] about Padma day and night," and that he was a dick because she wanted to have his children and he dumped her via e-mail. This is roughly analogous to your drunken ex-girlfriend e-mailing you a vicious screed in the middle of the night, and most adults have learned that the safe, gentlemanly thing to do is do not respond to those e-mails. Salman Rushdie, however, is no gentleman.

So he wrote a lengthy, angry statement to Page Six proving that a) he is a thin-skinned, defensive child, and b) he is absolutely, incontrovertibly, indubitably still in love with Padma Lakshmi. It bears quoting at length:

The reason I broke up with Pia Glenn is that I came to feel that she's an unstable person who carries around a large, radioactive bucket of stress wherever she goes. It was just exhausting to deal with.

Her recent explosions . . . demonstrate that she is also an accomplished liar.

It is hard even to list the untruths in her article. We never lived together — she lived at her father's home in Freeport, LI. We never agreed to have children together. Our relationship lasted five and a half months, so it's hard to see how I 'stole a year' of her life.

What most distresses me, however, is her statement that I am still 'obsessed' with my ex-wife, Padma Lakshmi. When my marriage to Padma ended I was saddened and hurt, that's true, but that was two and a half years ago, and, like any adult, I have accepted the world as it is.

As any of my friends can attest, I long ago turned the page and moved on. It's absurd of Ms. Glenn to say otherwise. I wish Padma nothing but the best, particularly now that she is expecting, and have written to her to congratulate her. End of story.

And the kicker:

Rushdie added in a statement: "She's broke, unemployed . . . and obviously decided to sell me out.

Shouldn't spending a decade or so of your life under constant threat of assassination by a global band of violent fanatics who want to silence you teach you something about what matters in life, and what does not matter? Note to Salman Rushdie: Shit like this does not matter. Stop talking to Page Six. Also, please do not stop talking to Page Six, because post-midlife-crisis dissolutions are fun to write about.

Guess what the subtitle is! Do you give up? It is "An American Life."

Here's a brief list of people with biographies subtitled "An American Life"

• Ronald Reagan
• Benjamin Franklin
• Jerry Garcia
• Joe Papp
• D.W. Griffith
• Ben Hogan
• Dr. Spock
• Burt Lancaster
• Martha Washington
• Condoleezza Rice
• Pat Robertson
• Elizabeth Cady Stanton
• Guitars.

Anyway! Going Rogue: An American Life is due out November 17. It is 400 whole pages long! Christ. Let's hope it is all about how Trig and Track and Trip and Tricky Palin are all secretly Bristol's kids, and not boring nonsense about Her Beliefs On The Economy or whatever.

The Lost Symbol (the book is named for the archaic graphemes found throughout the book—when decoded these "alphabetic letters" make up the "text" of the novel) is expected to be the only book America buys this year, which sounds bad, but last year America didn't buy any book (the last Harry Potter apparently came out in 2007). In addition to the publishing industry, the book is expected to save big box retailers, all of whom are suffering now because no one has enough income to buy shit anymore (thanks to NOBAMA's massive tax hikes).

Barnes & Noble and Borders and Amazon are all going to sell the book for almost half off its retail price, and you can buy the electric Amazon Game Boy version of the book for a mere ten dollars!

In England, Asda, which is a grocery store (grocery stores are where English people buy their books and albums, which is why Vera Lynn is still the hottest recording artist in the UK), is selling Brown's book for five pounds, which is like eight bucks, give or take. Britishers are expected to ride double-decker buses driving down the wrong side of the street to buy the books in droves, as soon as the copies are unloaded from "lorries."

Everyone acknowledges that the book isn't actually any good, but everyone also agrees that that doesn't matter.

And the book takes place, as we said, in Washington, which means it will be impossible to visit the following places for a couple years: The Library of Congress, the National Gallery, the Capitol Rotunda and the Smithsonian. And probably a bunch of other places! It will be kind of like what Sex & The City did to the West Village, except the people being inconvenienced will be even more annoying.

Also: Masons are totally thrilled to have a new book all about them, because maybe that will get the kids interested in Masonry again, like in the '50s, the golden age of being a Mason.

Which is kind of a shame! The old "Vintage Contemporaries" cover was as much of an awesome time capsule as Jay McInerney's book is. It's perfect! The oddly colored illustration of an anonymous guy in a trench coat wandering toward The Odeon with the Twin Towers in the background, those bold colors and the justified text makes it look like an '80s video game, which is perfect for a novel that reads like a text-based RPG in which YOU are a DISSATISFIED FACT CHECKER SEEKING SOLACE IN DRUGS AND EMPTY HEDONISM.

But now it is 2009, and, weirdly, the Twin Towers are gone but The Odeon is not. And so, a new cover. This one just looks like the opening credits of Saturday Night Live.

Hello, the New York Daily News got a copy of "Madoff's Other Secret: Love, Money, Bernie, and Me" (out August 25!) and did a quickie read mostly looking for the sexy passages, and slapped that mutha right on the cover of the paper! And by 'mutha' we mean "Bernie Madoff had a little dick, she says."

Weinstein, who has known Madoff for two decades, said she was stunned the first time they had sex in late 1993.

"... This man was not well-endowed," said Weinstein, who was once a top executive with the Jewish women's group Hadassah and lost her life savings with Madoff

The victim's revenge! Justice is served! Weinstein clarifies, though: "When we made love, I was on fire."

Looks like the only problem was you and your small penis, Bernie Madoff! Weinstein says they liked to meet up in hotels, drink vodka, take baths, smoke weed, get massages, and then make sweet sweet love. It was so sweet that she and her friends nicknamed Bernie "Winky Dink."

Weinstein, btw, is still married, to a very understanding man.

[Also another book says Bernie slept with a bunch of secretaries, which is just further proof of Ruth Madoff's total innocence.]

According to The Guardian, Golding's biographer, Oxford English professor John Carey, discovered the rape story in his subject's journals as well as in the manuscript of an unpublished memoir.

Carey quotes the memoir as partially excusing the attempted rape on the grounds that Dora was "depraved by nature" and, at 14, was "already sexy as an ape".

It reveals that Golding told his wife he had been sure the girl "wanted heavy sex". She fought him off and ran away as he stood there shouting: "I'm not going to hurt you," the memoir said.

Two years later, the pair met again and had sex in a field, with Golding again introducing crudity by quoting the girl's foreplay remark: "Should I have all that rammed up my guts?"

Goldman's writings also suggest that the girl he attempted to rape later tried to have his father watch the two of them having sex in a field though binoculars, and that his idea for Lord of the Flies sprung from sociological experiments he conducted students while working as a teacher.

In a somewhat related note, "you're sexy as an ape" will be my new favorite pickup line until the first time I get slapped across the face for uttering it, which probably shouldn't take very long at all.

Pic via

The New Yorker's Book Bench blog discovered these sad, young, hard literary men, all of whom say they work in "law, publishing and high technology." When these hard guys meet up, they just don't talk about books, they also do hard things like playing paintball and gambling and shooting guns and engaging in contests involving feats of strength. The group's founder, who goes by the hard name of Tanaka, had this to say about why he started a book club exclusively for Boston's rock hard swinging dicks:

I started this club as an anti-establishment book club that spits in the faces of the traditional girlie clubs where people don't discuss the book, and just drink wine and talk about relationships. I have a good number of smart, successful friends who are very well read, and want to kick ass like I do. Throw in beer, competition, and seedy locations, and we had the perfect recipe to have fun while motivating us to continue to read and kick ass collectively.

According to their website, these hard boys love books by hard authors like Cormac McCarthy and Ernest Hemingway, but hated C. D. Payne's Youth in Revolt because it just wasn't hard enough for their tastes. Shockingly, there are no Chuck Palahniuk books on their list of past selections, but just give it some time — after reading Chuck they'll probably all spontaneously drop their pants and start masturbating in front of each other, because that's the type of shit hard guys do when they're totally intellectually stimulated, and there wouldn't be nothing gay about that at all because it's all about being hard baby!

Long live the Scorpions! If there's one thing this world needs more of, it's "anti-establishment" book clubs.

Grace's dogged and relentless pursuit of anyone she assumes is guilty made her a very successful prosecutor who only occasionally had convictions overturned because of her misconduct, and it also made her a hugely popular television personality. She is a nightly reminder that It Can Happen Here, and there would be a scary shitload of popular support for some law-and-order type promising to clean up American with lynch mobs (Giuliani '12!).

But she has a book to promote! It's about "Hailey Dean," "a hard-hitting, victim-rights prosecutor in Atlanta who sends hundreds of people to jail" with a murdered fiance.

Please welcome the kinder, gentler Nancy Grace. She is married and has baby twins now and so she is not shouting so much. But she is even more angry about "crimes against children" now, and we should all celebrate her "passion" and her "crusade."

But early reviews have not been kind. Kirkus Reviews calls it "formulaic and simplistic." Publishers Weekly dubs it "less than compelling." There are 70,000 copies after two printings.

Why doesn't America want to read a legal thriller about an idealized Nancy Grace figure?? And will there be sex scenes? (Foster, could you get on this?)

Ahem:

His father is Terry McDonell, the editor of Sports Illustrated, and he grew up in the kind of gilded New York household where Joan Didion, Jay McInerney and George Plimpton were drop-in guests. His godfather is Morgan Entrekin, the publisher of Grove/Atlantic, who bought Mr. McDonell's first novel, "Twelve," when Mr. McDonell was just 18. He heard news of its acceptance while cruising home in the carpool from Riverdale Country School, where he was president of the student body.

So that was his upbringing, and now he is a young literary success. His first novel was about "the downward-spiraling adventures of some druggy New York private-school students over Christmas break." His third novel—on sale Wednesday!—"ingeniously combines elements of a le Carré or Graham Greene-like international thriller with a campus novel set at Harvard, from which Mr. McDonell graduated in 2007." Yes, of course.

He has already published "a brief memoir" of his time at Harvard (well, it was published in France). That time, it seems, was colored by a certain "detachment" from the escalation of the war in Iraq—a war arranged and waged by Ivy Leaguers, you see! Conflict! (He also published a second novel, about, according to Wikipedia, "a 19-year-old Harvard student who is deeply affected by time he spends in Bangkok working as an intern reporter.")

The movie version of his first book (the one about private school kids taking drugs) is filming now, in the West Village. Batman Forever auteur Joel Schumacher is directing it! "It's sort of like Margaret Mead," Joel Schumacher says. "For Nick to have written this at 87 would be staggering. I keep asking myself how could he know all this at 17?"

Dody was, in the late '50s and '60s, a ghostwriter, primarily to aging but still fiery female stars. He authored Bette Davis' The Lonely Life as well as books "by" silent film star Dagmar Godowsky, Helen Hayes, and John Barrymore's ex-wife Elaine Barrymore.

The intimate act of writing a strong personality's life story did not endear his subjects to him: "'The most suitable way to view stars is from a long way off,' he wrote in his own memoir, published in 1980." And: "'Let the next star,' he glowered, 'write her own damned autobiography.'"

After a brief trip to Hollywood, made with the intention of becoming a film star, Dody became a writer instead. In need of money, he wrote Godowsky's memoir. He never seems to have enjoyed the experience much, but he made his subjects sound good:

As a ghostwriter, Mr. Dody was expected to suppress his personality and channel the voice of the credited author. Yet often his own writing style crept in. In "First Person Plural," Ms. Godowsky's 1958 memoir of her life on the silver screen, the opening sentences, supposedly straight from Ms. Godowsky's pen, read: "It is my tragedy that the years have deprived me of my bad reputation. At one time my notoriety assured me of a marvelous evening. Now, Euclid would be fascinated to know, my circle has been squared."

He got along famously with Bette Davis, until she took a hatchet to "his" book (she was, he claimed, embarrassed that she hadn't written it herself). After penning Helen Hayes' memoir, he got out of the business. He spent a good part of his later years walking from his Greenwich Village apartment to the Met, and back.

Prior to reading this feature in today's New York Times on Vollmann, who has a new book out this week, titled Imperial, that is 1300 pages long and retails for $55, we were not all that familiar with him. Sure, we'd heard of him, but we'd never read anything written by him or about him. He is now one of our personal heroes. Here are a few excerpts from the piece that illustrate why:

...while working on "Imperial," for which he also wore a spy camera while trying to infiltrate a Mexican factory, and paddled in an inflatable raft down the New River in California, a rancid trench that is probably the most polluted stream in America. The water, he writes, tasted like the Salk polio vaccine.

Mr. Vollmann spent two weeks alone at the magnetic North Pole, where he suffered frostbite and permanently burned off his eyebrows when he accidentally set his sleeping bag on fire. But being eyebrowless has its advantages, he discovered more recently, while experimenting with cross-dressing to research a novel he's now writing about the transgendered. He didn't have to pluck his brows when getting made up.

Mr. Vollmann collects pistols and likes to shoot them. He has traveled to Thailand, Bosnia, Somalia, Russia, Afghanistan and Iraq, among other places, studying war and poverty, and has a way of picking up prostitutes just about wherever he goes. He has spent considerable time with skinheads, winos, crackheads and meth tweakers, and has ingested plenty of illegal substances himself.

"Crack," he said recently, "is a really great drug - it's like having three cups of coffee at once."

Do you really need anymore? This piece is one of the more fascinating literary profiles we've read in some time and we are suddenly intrigued by Vollmann because of it. Go read it.

An Author Without Borders [New York Times]

Heller tells the tale of reading Marber's notes on her book as he wrote the adaptation:

There was this odd moment right at the end of the promotional tour for Notes on a Scandal, when we did this event in LA where they got me to read a section of my book and Patrick to read a section of his script. At the last minute I realised I didn't have a copy of the book, so Patrick gave me his. I started flicking through and he'd written comments such as "Boring old crap..." or "Eh??"

Don't worry, there were no hard feelings. It's just that some stuff wasn't going to work in a movie. That's all! Tea, anyone?

Charlize Theron would like to star as Dabney Coleman Dagny Taggart, the lady who runs her brother's railroad and enjoys violent sex with secretive entrepreneurial geniuses. But there is a problem: the book has not ever been filmed because it is terrible and involves a climactic 70-page monologue about radical libertarianism!

Typically, Hollywood will just bastardize a difficult text, seizing hold of a novel and wrenching it into something sellable, like a Rand hero conquering a Rand heroine. But in this case, the pansies don't want to hurt any of Ayn's precious words, so Charize is selling it as miniseries to a pay-cable network Lionsgate and MGM and Viacom/Paramount are all starting, apparently.

And if they don't start shooting by 2010, the rights to the book will lapse! And that would be a disaster, for everyone!

We've developed a magical engine that will transform the book into an entertaining, crowd-pleasing blockbuster, but because of useless statists and weak-willed bureaucrats we are going to destroy it and run away to live in a Gulch. Then we will take over the world!

Well, a couple people noticed. Anyone who actually read the review should've noticed, because if you're reading Modernism/Modernity you really ought to recognize the visiting lecturer on Living Icons from White Noise. Especially once the review stopped addressing the Wallace book and detoured into DeLillo pastiche.

It is at this point that I must confess to missing something in Wallace, namely the presence of women nearer the center of the narration (setting aside Lenore Stonecipher Beadsman, Jr., the protagonist in Wallace's first novel, The Broom of the System). I admit that I've always been partial to them, i.e. women. I fall apart at the sight of long legs, striding, briskly, as a breeze carries up from the river, on a weekday, in the play of morning light. And what fun it is to talk to an intelligent woman wearing nylon stockings as she crosses her legs. Wallace, I suspect, shares these predilections and could write wonderfully complicated women.

And, you know, there are footnotes citing Jack Gladney. But still, you don't expect a puckish little pomo joke like that from the staid folks at Modernism/Modernity. Which is why, maybe, actual real-life graduate students are citing the review as a serious piece of scholarly work. Which, guys, White Noise is only a cornerstone of postmodern American literature that you should be intimately familiar with by the time you're registering for classes for the second semester of your freshman year! We're just saying!

But, yes, Modernism/Modernity has acknowledged that this was just a little gag and not an Alan Sokal-style hoax intended to deceive. And But it took five years! (We were maybe all too preoccupied with death?)

Responding to the question, "If I were to write to you and say, 'Dave, cheer me up about the future of writing,' what would you say?" Eggers said the following:

Our students at 826 Valencia still have a newspaper class, where we print an actual newspaper, and we do magazine classes and anthologies where they're all printed on paper. That's the main way we get them motivated, that they know it's going to be in print. It's much harder for us to motivate the students when they think it's only going to be on the Web.

The vast majority of students we work with read newspapers and books, more so than I did at their age. And I don't see that dropping off. If anything the lack of faith comes from people our age, where we just assume that it's dead or dying. I think we've given up a little too soon. We [i.e., McSweeney's] have been working every day on a prototype for a new newspaper, and a lot of what we're doing is resurrecting old things, like things from the last century that newspapers used to do, in terms of really using the full luxury of the broadsheet newspaper, with full color and all that space.

I think newspapers shouldn't try to compete directly with the Web, and should do what they can do better, which may be long-form journalism and using photos and art, and making connections with large-form graphics and really enhancing the tactile experience of paper. You know, including a full-color comic section, for example, which of course was standard in newspapers years ago, when you'd have a full broadsheet Winsor McCay comic. So we'll have a big, full-color comic section, and we're also trying to emphasize what younger readers are looking for, what directly appeals to them. It's hard to find papers these days that really do anything to appeal to anyone under 18, and the paper used to do that all the time. I think there will always be — if not the same audience and not as wide an audience — a dedicated audience that can keep print journalism alive.

Now, we like Dave Eggers, a lot, but we have to emphatically disagree with his statements here. Children attending a writing center in San Francisco do not accurately reflect the entirety of the modern American youth. Not even close. Sure, we'd love to see web and print co-exist and thrive and compliment each other, but there is no trend suggesting such a thing is on the horizon. It just isn't happening.

Dave Eggers, we like you, we really do, but your staggering genius has failed you and you are horribly, horribly wrong.

Dave Eggers Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Reality [Salon]

Playboy actually first excerpted Nabokov's Ada or, Ardor back in 1969, when they were a very popular and highbrow titty mag. But the years have not been kind to Playboy, because the years invented the internet, and everyone forgot both how to read and how to masturbate to magazines.

And do you know who we don't envy? Playboy's literary editor, Amy Grace Loyd.

So. Vlad Nabokov, one of the most brilliant English-language authors ever, had not finished his last work, The Original of Laura, when he died. And he demanded that it never be published, because he was a bit of a perfectionist. Vlad's son Dmitri complied with his dad's wishes for many years, until he decided to just let it be published, because why not. So "super-agent" Andrew Wylie took over, and Amy Grave Loyd attempted to woo him with orchids, a reference to Ada.

Ms. Loyd was disappointed, figuring the honor of first serial was more likely to go to a place like The New Yorker, which had its own long history with Nabokov, and had in fact just last summer published one of his newly translated short stories. Ms. Loyd's worry was not unfounded: Mr. Wylie had indeed sent Laura to the The New Yorker months earlier. But as it happened, according to a source at the magazine, the fiction department was not interested. (Fiction editor Deborah Treisman had no comment.)

On the first of June, Mr. Wylie changed his tune and wrote to Ms. Loyd asking her what, hypothetically, Playboy would be willing to pay for an exclusive.

They were willing to pay more than they have ever paid for a book excerpt before, and they were willing to pay this much without even reading a word of it. And it kinda turns out that the book might not be very good! "There are parts of it that are much more cohesive than others. But I found it fascinating in that way," Loyd says.

But 5,000 words of The Original of Laura will run in the December Playboy, presumably next to reviews of the latest in hi-fi gear, Canadian whiskey ads, Gahan Wilson cartoons, a lengthy Q&A with Mort Sahl, and nude pictures of Barbara Carrera. Pick it up at your local newsagent!

Here in America, presidents do very occasionally read picture books to children, but a Mr. Bush kind of ruined that practice, for everyone, and so really only first ladies get those elementary school photo-ops, now.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.But here is Mr. Guttenberg reading the classic fairy tale "Hans in Luck" to some children. "Hans in Luck" is the story of a boy, Hans, who has a big piece of gold, and then he trades it for a horse, and then he trades the horse for a cow, and then he trades the cow for a pig, and he continues on in this fashion until he has a spinning wheel, which he loses, but his mom loves him anyway. The fairy tale is about the gold standard and it was told to the Brothers Grimm by Ron Paul, many years ago.

Meanwhile in France, their "Culture Minister" read a book about Venice by a gay 19th century poet named Alfred de Musset. Like, out loud! In public! Can you imagine if we had a "Culture Minister"? It would probably be Larry the Cable Guy. Or we'd call it a "Culture Czar" and it would be Bill Bennett.

[Top pics: Sean Gallup/Getty Images. Bottom: PHILIPPE MERLE/AFP/Getty Images]