Lincoln's Mother's Pussy

To the more demure members of my readership, I apologize for the title of this post. It is calculated to catch your eye, not to provoke your ire.

I remember hearing some years ago about a study that had revealed the three most common words featured in bestsellers' titles were "Lincoln," "Mother," and "Cat." Predictably, some bright-eyed entrepreneur took what he saw as a surefire route to publishing success and penned a book entitled Lincoln's Mother's Cat.*

I was reminded of this anecdote today when my humble little blog racked up several comments on this post in an unprecedented amount of time. Apparently, the pressing demand for Colbert tickets ratcheted up the relative importance of what was - in retrospect - one of my less self-aware posts.

So this got me thinking about self-awareness (or "meta-blogging") and also about marketing.

For some, the "meta" trend in books & movies has already overstayed its welcome. You could make the case that books like Dave Eggers' A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius & movies like Spike Jonze's Adaptation, though cool, ultimately demonstrate that strip-mining one's own work in progress, for the sake of a few inside jokes, adds up to much less than the sum of its parts.

Personally, I'm on the fence. There were moments in the book and the movie that I felt were a bit too cute, a bit too forced, a bit too manufactured. Of course, that feeling could be the effect their creators were going for, but I think this gives them too much credit. Why not pull back a bit on those reigns and craft something clever AND genuine? That strikes me as a far more worthy challenge for artists so clearly gifted and creative. On the other hand, there's something satisfying about being in the know. Getting it. Winking back. Maybe that's shallow intellectual vanity. And worse: shallow intellectual vanity with the illusion of depth. I don't know. But it is fun.

Charlie Kauffman, the screenwriter for Adaptation (and Being John Malkovich & Eternal Sunshine), wrote the upcoming Synechdoche, NY. Read the synopsis. It could very well be the last word on meta-cinema. My esteemed friend Brendan observed that he always wants to see Charlie Kauffman movies, but they never SOUND like anything you'd want to sit through. I agree. The descriptions of Kauffman's vision always appear overwrought. He packs a decade's worth of ideas into each script and so each plot summary can't help but sound like a hot mess. The disjointed movies - disorienting even for those putting in the requisite two hours - must be a nightmare for the promoters and marketers tasked with condensing them into two minutes. Does anyone remember the preview for Adaptation? Yeah, well, thankfully after over five years of intensive therapy, neither do its editors.

The release of Kauffman's latest nonetheless affords me an amazing opportunity for meta-blogging. I could see Synechdoche, NY in Schenectady, NY. I could smuggle my laptop in and live-blog my reaction to the movie. I could write a stream-of-consciousness narrative about my fixation on meta-blogging and the act of blogging the movie while I blogged the movie. I could post a hyperlink on the final post that led to the final post. Somewhere, Doc Brown's head is swirling with the possibilities and their ramifications for the space-time continuum. This is heavy.

Anyway, this all began as a meditation on the unexpected feedback I received regarding a post that reached a larger audience than I intended. Now I'm going to fish for some more. Here are the top ten keyword searches on Google, according to this blog:

1. pussy
2. porn
3. google
4. boobs
5. hentai
6. paris hilton
7. ebay
8. yahoo
9. sex
10. milf

I wonder who will be leaving comments on this post. No doubt they will be disappointed by what they find. Hmmm, maybe I should be careful what I wish for...

In closing, a question to ponder: based on the terms in the top ten, would you say that internet users are overwhelmingly perverts or are perverts overwhelmingly online? The world may never know.

* - Amusingly, after all this talk, I can't find the book in question. Several Google search permutations yielded nothing. Nothing! Nothing for a book that presumably could outdistance the Bible in total sales someday. I guess print is dead. Or at least, in this case, it's M.I.A.