In vague honour of the recent release of The McSweeney’s Joke Book of Book JokesIn vague honour of the recent release of The McSweeney’s Joke Book of Book Jokes (featuring a riff on Borgès by occasional Walrus contributor David Ng),^{*I shouldn’t be honouring them, given that they turned down my hilarious submission, “Gary Shteyngart Is a Shtupidface,” but that’s just the kind of generous spirit I am.} an unwittingly funny quote I had the misfortune to come across yesterday. It’s the response of Sweden’s foremost contribution to world literature, August Strindberg,^{*Sorry about your luck, Göran Sonnevi.} to Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil :

The uterus of my mental world had received a tremendous ejaculation of sperm from Friedrich Nietzsche, so that I [felt] like a bitch with a full belly… He’s the man for me.

Sometimes the jokes just write themselves.^{*Hold your cursor over the photo, for example.}

Also, a groaner I heard a few weeks ago on KCRW’s Bookworm podcast. This one’s a simile from William T. Vollmann’s Riding Toward Everywhere : “pale as a vegan girl’s urine.”

Is that even factually accurate? Never mind, I don’t want to know.^{*That was just for the squares who hang out in the body text. I really, really want to know. Please tell me, cool sidenote people.}

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Next, on the Bironist: I go for six.

Tags: August Strindberg, Friedrich Nietzsche, McSweeney's

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Posted on Wednesday, May 7th, 2008 at 2:18 pm. Follow comments through the RSS 2.0 feed. Comment, or trackback .