Inspired in no small part by Friend of the Toast Emily Gould.
Q: How many male novelists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
A: The terrible sex had made him feel deeply interesting, like a murder victim.
Q: How many male novelists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
A: The beast, which had represented his feelings, was dead. “I think I’ll do a pushup,” he announced to the sea. The sea respected him for it.
Q: How many male novelists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
A: [4000 words from the narrator about his feelings on his childhood circumcision]
Q: How many male novelists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
A: War is hell.
Q: How many male novelists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
A: He straightened his tie. He had lost, but in a romantic way, which meant that he had won. “I’m going to do a pushup,” he announced to his tie. His tie respected him for it, and secretly wished that it could have sex with him.
Q: How many male novelists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
A: You wouldn’t understand.
Q: How many male novelists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
A: He swore curses at his coworkers. He was making a lot of money. Fuck.
Q: How many male novelists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
A: This neighborhood in New York City was very different from the other neighborhood in New York City he’d just been in.
Q: How many male novelists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
A: He lit a cigarette. His glass of whiskey lit a cigarette too. “I can only truly love my best friend,” he said, “but not in a gay way. Women wouldn’t understand it. They’re too gay.” Both of the cigarettes agreed.
Q: How many male novelists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
A: [4000 words about an isolated encounter with a service worker that borders on racist and goes nowhere]
Q: How many male novelists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
A: “The cocaine isn’t the point. The cocaine is a metaphor,” he explained wearily over the pile of cocaine. She folded her arms. She didn’t understand his cocaine. “Didn’t you read my manifesto?” The prostitute had read his manifesto. Why couldn’t she?
Q: How many male novelists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
A: This lightbulb is inauthentic.
Q: How many male novelists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
A: ”It’s only the institution I have a problem with,” he explained to the empty bar.
Q: How many male novelists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
A: The time had come for him to go to war, and also find himself, and also reject the rules of your society.
Q: How many male novelists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
A: His alcoholism was different, because someday he was going to die.
Q: How many male novelists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
A: [Nothing happens for 450 pages; receives fourteen awards]
Tags: jokes, male novelists
*cackles freely*
A+ jokes, A+ picture change
“The cocaine isn’t the point. The cocaine is a metaphor,” he explained wearily over the pile of cocaine. She folded her arms. She didn’t understand his cocaine. “Didn’t you read my manifesto?” The prostitute had read his manifesto. Why couldn’t she?
i think i dated this guy for a while in 2006
HIS ALCOHOLISM WAS DIFFERENT.
His was the only alcoholism rooted in true, existential dissatisfaction. All other alcoholisms were just weakness. But not his.
As he languidly pulled his straight razor across his craggy, lathered cheekbones, his eyes wandered up to his pronounced widow’s peak – the one feature of his generically handsome face he had always considered distinctive and unique, truly his. With mounting unease, he began to wonder: Is my hair thinning? Is it… Am I… going bald? By the end of his shave, having turned his head this way and that, squinting at his reflection in the low light, he couldn’t decide if his hair was indeed leaving his head as rats might flee a sinking ship, or if his deep-seated fear of one day looking (and being) like his father had finally gotten the better of him.
“Are you coming to bed, honey?” his wife – ten years younger than him, sexually rapacious, intellectually vapid – called to him from their boudoir.
“No,” he replied resolutely, applying an extra spritz of cologne to his neck and wondering where he’d put his battered old leather jacket, from his days herding cattle on the ranch, before he’d written his first novel, before he’d gotten tenure at Harvard, before the drudgery of endless conferences, dinner parties, more novels, the New York Times bestseller list…before all this. “I’m going… out.”
Love.
Oh god I love this!
yes. a thousand times yes
Last week, I heard a wannabe-male-poet saying “everybody talks about female circumcision like it’s the most terrible thing, but nobody talks about male circumcision”. The joke writes itself.
I hope he wrote a sonnet about his foreskin.
O hail! Thou heav’nly flap on edge of dick
Cruelly hacked from me while but a babe…
Sorry, I can’t keep it up, the sniggering is interfering with my typing.
At first, I read “o hail!” as “o hai!”, and now I can’t decide which version I prefer.
Herrick?
Q: How many male novelists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
A: The vast difference in age gives the lightbulb permission to submit, I think. To give yourself over intimately to a much, much older man provides this sort of lightbulb with authority of a kind she cannot get in a sexual arrangement with a younger man.
This is my favorite comment in this thread. Allow the approval of a stranger’s laughter to soothe any worries you have for the rest of the day.
A+++++++++
‘How many Male Novelists does it take to screw in a lightbulb’
Let us consider the unique and tragic, err, tragedy of the white male experience. Violence, emotional constipation! Itellectual superiority! All those silly women and brown people not knowing their place any more. You must show them.
No wonder they’re all too tired to change lightbulbs. Their wives change lightbulbs, so that they can write.
“All those silly women and brown people not knowing their place any more. You must show them.”
And then, damn them, they don’t even read your novel! But that’s okay because other white males do, and they’re the ones that count.
A: [4000 words about an isolated encounter with a service worker that borders on racist and goes nowhere]
AHHH THIS! IN EVERY NOVEL THIS!
He lit a cigarette. His glass of whiskey lit a cigarette too. “I can only truly love my best friend,” he said, “but not in a gay way. Women wouldn’t understand it. They’re too gay.” Both of the cigarettes agreed.
Leonardo DiCaprio cameos as first and second cigarettes in the movie version, attempting to show us how good he is at quiet, subtle comedy. It fails miserably; he looks too much like a crumpled cigarette butt.
Wins an Oscar.
Both of the cigarettes agreed.
Only cigarettes and whiskey can understand bromance, because they are the ultimate bromance.
“It’s so true”, I said as my freshly lit cigarette took a straight-faced gulp of whisky.
LOL Yessssssssss
LOL YESSSSSSSS
Q: How many male novelists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
A: It was all his mother’s fault.
The mere act of screwing in a bulb to a socket is such a penetrative, essentially male act. I may ponder this more while I fish and fuck and feel sorry for myself. *broods*.
This is pure Gaddis.
“Two, but I don’t know how they got in there.
Also not in a gay way.”
THIS comment.
Q: How many male novelists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
A: “Why is it me that must change?” he mutters at his crusty sock, this time with a slow, pathetic cadence that reminded him of the broken wheel of that wagon he pulled boyishly towards the porch. And he reached for the bottle.
When she was writing this brilliance IN TEN MINUTES THIS MORNING, she read some to me, but my kid was yelling in my ear about dogs, so I thought she was saying “male models,” and only the pushup ones made sense.
I am so glad that you harness her power for good. Evil, delicious good.
The correct answer is one. But it’s the most interesting light bulb in the world.
I thought it was “None, none, and never. Only the darkness truly understands me.”
You are so fucking funny. You make me ugly laugh, and the howls startle the dog awake and make the cats dive for cover.
Q: How many male novelists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
A: “You have so much to learn,” he told her. She was only 19, but she was the best student in his undergraduate short story class who was also female and classically beautiful. “I will teach you, and also have sex with you. You can walk around wearing only my tweed jacket after, but only for 20 minutes. You’re not ready to wear it for longer.”
“Is that the jacket with the elbow patches?” she murmured, her full lips plump as an overripe cherry, already tainted with corruption at the pit.
“No,” he said harshly, “it has double elbow patches.” He turned to face the window. “I knew you wouldn’t understand.”
Double elbow patches!
He writes all of his fiction longhand because technology is a soulless lie, so his elbow scrapes against an antique walnut desk around twenty, twenty-one hours a day. When he wears out the elbow patches on the right hand, he switches to writing left-handed. He has a closet full of old tweed blazers, holes burnt into each elbow, redolent of tobacco, whiskey, and the pig-sweat smell of a man laboring over his manly craft.
(I could do this all day, please give me an excuse to do this all day.)
Feel free to do this all day. NOW TELL ME ABOUT HIS SWEATER VESTS!
His sweater vests were all 100% Irish lambswool. When he wore them he would stroke them gently, like a stubbly, slightly-itchy lover, and think of his childhood, of watching the sheep go out to pasture, driven by his older siblings while he hid in the barn and read Dante’s Inferno in the original Italian (it was, of course, a trifle vulgar, but he was only eight at the time and hadn’t yet developed good taste). His father had always been disappointed in him, and he had rebelled by going to the city at age 17 and learning swears, but sometimes he would stroke his sweater vests and think that he would have been happier as a farmer. His vague dissatisfaction with the elegant dinner parties and casual sex he was constantly participating in must, he thought, be the depths of despair.
The night that everything changed, she had been slowly walking toward him wearing nothing but the blazer with its double elbow patches as he sat on the edge of the King sized bed. Undoubtedly feeling empowered by being fully ensconced in his male gaze, she glanced at his writing desk, and casually drifted a hand to touch the stubbly wool of his sweater vest draped over the chair. “NO!” He cried. She looked shocked. She did not understand. “Don’t you touch that– Don’t you EVER touch that!” “But Alan–” she began. He rose to standing position and glared fire into her frightened eyes. “The patched blazer is for you. The sweater vests are for me. ONLY me.”
She left him two weeks later. He had always known she would. Women were fickle, unknowable, while also being transparent and simpler, always simpler than him. He knew she would leave, just like his seven ex-wives and nineteen ex-mistresses, so he had never bothered to treat her with the same respect he showed his male colleagues. It was important to predict every relationship’s failure so he could continue to be right about everything, all of the time, which was the cornerstone his life was built on.
His indifference to her was his preemptive revenge, and it was completely justified by her eventual abandonment of him when he needed her most. It was Tango Tuesday; their special day. “Who am I supposed to dance with?” he had asked, as she packed. “Some other, less attractive woman?” She didn’t answer. He had watched her walk out into the rain, and it was then that he knew: he would never tango on a Tuesday again.
[FIN]
I love all of you.
I have never seen anything more brilliant in all my life.
And the turtlenecks? And the corduroy trousers? Please, I beg you.
What Happens To Them Fifteen Years Later
A long-married academic couple, scraping by as adjunct professors at a small college in western Massachusetts. They wear heavy sweaters all winter to keep the heat down low, and the husband’s refusal to have the hole in his right sleeve fixed is a long-simmering point of contention between them. One night, she notices a fresh piece of yarn dangling from him into his bowl of lentil and split pea soup. She stabs him through the eye with her knitting needle, finishes his soup, and begins to darn. Fifteen hours later, she is led away in cuffs, muttering softly, “The hole….. the hole…. the hole.”
This pretty much happened to me when I was 19.
[“What Happens To Them Fifteen Years Later – The Prologue – Part One ] Realized my comment reqd. them to get back together after they broke up! Neither of them could stay away from Tango Tuesday. At the zinc bar, staffed by the exotic Balinese with sloping eyes and zig-zag curves, he sipped his whiskey and smoked. In she walked, the 19 year old who was talented as well as classically beautiful and female. By her side, the interloping Cavendish, the Australian exchange student. A mere whelp! Seeing them together, he was seized by a fierce rumbling in his priapic nether regions. He stood up, momentarily thwarted by his sudden realization that he had “gone commando” that night. But carry on. Carry on.
PROLOGUE to “What Happens To Them 15 Years Late – Part Two”
He strode towards them. “May I cut in?” He noted the gentle but growling manner of his speech to himself. Grasping the charmingly angry beauty from the oily Aussie lad (reeking unashamedly of Axe and hormone) he threw her over his shoulder, and carried her to his waiting Toyota Tercel. They drove through the night to Vegas and did the deed. His fierce attack of her resistant battlement was replaced by gratitude when as they hit the all-night wedding chapel. How could it not be thus, as her eyes opened to his great sacrifice, a Lone Wolf finally tamed by her womanly wiles. But though her wiles were womanly, she fortunately still looked like a girl.
The sidebar ad for James Franco’s novel makes this all the more perfect.
Probably the first time ever I regret having AdBlock…
Phillip Roth doesn’t think this is funny AT ALL.
How many male novelists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
i reject the societal necessities for lightbulbs, and
also grammar
“Two: One to get his adoring female student to do it for him, and one to hold his cigarette.”
God bless you.
A million times – YES. The last one is the best one, in my opinion.
i wonder what the satirical female novelist answers might look like… some sort of monologue?
The existence of the female novelist is a myth. Women lack the upper body strength necessary to write books.
omg
Why didn’t the female novelist’s lightbulb get screwed in, because Cheryl strayed.
omg
Mallory Ortberg leans forward to place a cool, soft, feminine finger to your lips. “Shh,” she whispers. “We make jokes here.”
I think you meant “leans in.”
I knew there was a reason my glass of whiskey wasn’t facilitating my writing. I needed to give the little guy a cigarette of his own.
The most important post on the internet.
Q: How many male novelists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
A: I am the lightbulb.
Q: How many male novelists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
A: He could not, thought his rough, hard, hands, which were like that of a man’s, screw in the lightbulb; his hands were too rough, too hard, too like a man’s; had been made that way by a long, arduous lifetime’s worth of glasses-of-whiskey holdings and [3500 word stream of consciousness comparing vaginas to animals]
How many mail novelists does it take to screw in a light bulb?
Just one. The lightbulb did not realize it was beautiful. It was beautiful in a way that was only apparent to the male novelist.
HOLY CRAP NEW COMMENTS
Anyway this is my favorite post ever, all other posts can go home.
He thought about the time he went to Southeast Asia, to lose himself, to find himself, he wasn’t sure which. Instead, he was faced with a literal darkness. So many brown-skinned women beckoning to him, asking him to save them in their shy, simple way. But he couldn’t. He was only one white man, and he remembered the last, his most beloved, the girl in the sarong who served his tea in the mornings in that beach cabana in Bali. Alas, he was forced to leave her behind; despite the fact she had at least one more degree than he did and was just biding her time, waiting for a job opening, he was sure she would be lost and corrupted by the cosmopolitan, cynical society he dwelt in America. Better to leave her in her pure state in a golden-sand beach licked by crystalline waves, he thought before calling the bartender for another shot of whiskey, pondering why women here were so much more complicated yet so much simpler.
Post, thy name is perfection.
I am a woman living in Southeast Asia.
I bow to you.
omg.
The lightbulb did not surrender its light for an idea that it used to have about itself which is not true anymore.
How many male noelists does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: He stared into his whiskey sour, the 5th that hour, and imagined the face of the beautiful, older woman who had robbed him of his innocence, and sapped him of his strength. She bore a striking resemblance to his mother, but unlike that iron cage of indifference, she was easily dominated. He was the most sexually satisfying lover she had ever had, though he was only 6 years old, but felt nothing except the bitter emptiness of surrounding himself with his intellectual inferiors.
Lazily, he glanced down at the succubus between his legs, sucking his virility out of him. She was ethnic enough to be exotic and sexually voracious, but Eurocentric enough to still be attractive and intellectual, or as intellectual as a creature can that gushes forth blood like the mighty Nile at high tide [4000 word treatise on a trip to Egypt that left him only more bitterly isolated at the frailty of the human condition, and the brown body servant who worshipped him as a reincarnation of Osiris]
He detatched the succubus from his manhood, his iron shaft, his stick of power [4000 word exposition on the completely heterosexual experience he had with his Greek Classics professor, who taught him of art and love as only two heterosexual, virile men can teach one another] and slapped her across the face. The domestic abuse was poetic, and graceful, and only made her see the true suffering behind the genius.
“What good is changing the lightbulb, you whore?” he seethed. “We all are only plummeting towards eternal darkness. Might as well rehearse for that grand opening.”
OMG, I’m laughing so hard I can hardly read any more…
I can’t believe this isn’t the most liked comment on here.
I am a new reader and I am so happy to be here.
How many women writers does it take to appreciate this post? She watched him, her hands quivering around the stem of her wineglass, as he screwed in the lightbulb, oblivious to her, her tears, and she bit the inside of her cheeks, swallowing the words that had been ready to pour out of her, and drank instead. The lightbulb had won.
I think you are mocking people that richly deserve it, or at least can afford to be mocked a little. That goes with being famous, after all. However, when I think of “white male novelist” I think of Charles Dickens, Terry Pratchett, and Douglas Adams more than I think of the writers you lampoon here. (I don’t care much for the high literary modern novelist. They bore me.)
Not that I think that they couldn’t be lampooned, but somehow your category of “white male novelist” doesn’t really match up with mine.
That’s funny, I thought Doctor J was a Thomas Hardy fan.
You forgot “How many male novelists…”
*doffs hat*
Well-played.
Thanks for explaining that the author defined “white male novelist” to include more white male novelists than you, a man with clearly more expertise on who is included in the group “white male novelist.”
Seriously, you could have just laughed at the ones that you admit were targeted and accepted that they are, in fact, white male novelists, but instead, you took offense on behalf of white males and redefined white male novelist to justify that reaction.
This is, quite honestly, the first time that I’ve seen a someone mansplain that “white male” is too inclusive of white men in an attempt to insult a woman.
it’s the serpent that eats itself!
Ouroboros!
Orobobros
NOT ALL MALE NOVELISTS!!!
Take another look at Messrs. Dickens and Adams before you trot these particular specimens out as counterexamples. A word to the wise.
Q: How many male novelists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
A: One. The novelist holds the bulb still, and the world revolves around him. And his penis.
This comment wins.
We have a winner!
Oh my god, hahahah.
Perfect.
this is the most perfect thing I have ever read.
How many female novelists does it take to change a light bulb?
One.
She gets it done with little fuss and adds lightbulbs to her shopping list and gets back to writing. While the male novelist next door still in the dark writes a 5000 word treatise on how the dark and cold (he couldn’t find his electric bill to pay it) represents his mangst.
mangst!!!!! 🙂
Mangst! You win the internet.
She replaced the lightbulb again. With some irony in her interrogation, for when one woke at all, one’s relations changed, she looked at the lightbulb, the pitiless, the remorseless, which was so much her, yet so little her, which had her at its beck and call (she woke in the night and saw it bent across their bed, stroking the floor), but for all that she thought, watching it with fascination, hypnotised, as if it were stroking with its silver fingers some sealed vessel in her brain whose bursting would flood her with delight, she had known happiness, and it silvered the rough waves a little more brightly, as daylight faded, and the blue went out of the sea and it rolled in waves of pure lemon which curved and swelled and broke upon the beach and the ecstasy burst in her eyes and waves of pure delight raced over the floor of her mind and she felt, It is enough! It is enough!
Casey, I think you just ‘won’ the comments section.
(Spit take)
Q: How many male novelists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
A: He demurred. People often complained he only wrote one dimensional lightbulbs. Efforts to explain that his lightbulbs were there to shed light on the main characters fell of deaf ears. Wasn’t it better not to include any lightbulbs at all?
Somebody should tell Tom Wolfe that that suit isn’t even funny anymore.
O hail! Thou heav'nly flap on edge of dick
Cruelly hacked from me while but a babe…
Sorry, I can't keep it up, the sniggering is interfering with my typing.
That's funny, I thought Doctor J was a Thomas Hardy fan.
q: how many male novelists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
a: she wasn’t like the other girls. she listened to the smiths, to the greats, and he watched her dancing alone in that apartment, one frosty december night, and i want to shoot myself.
Q: How many male novelists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
A: [4000 words about an isolated encounter with a service worker that borders on racist and goes nowhere]
Chuck Palahniuk, ladies and gentlemen.
amazing. more please.
Q: How many male novelists does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A: Let me describe my semen now.
THIS is the reply that made the tears start running down my face in helpless lolarity. I CAN’T EVEN.
Q: How many male novelists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
A: He twists the bulb in the socket, contemplating the ingratitude of life. He cannot remember if he flipped the light switch before commencing, but it is too late to stop now, and there is no looking back, not even over his shoulder. What was in the past must remain in the past, no matter how it affects the present. It must never be faced, or dealt with. He turns the light bulb again.
The suspense fills him with a simultaneous dread and exaltation, as it had upon the occasion when his mother — that first female, the ur-woman, from whose octopodean umbilical noose he had yet to fully extricate himself — had delved into his room, among the piled Heinlein novels and unfinished manuscripts, seeking laundry for the daily wash.
Her rough, work-worn hand, brushing past a well-thumbed Rand novel, almost discovered the hidden whiskey bottle and the cigar box full of nude French postcards and a single Polaroid of his sister, who had died as a hooker in some California flophouse, closed upon his fap sock and lifted it heavenward, toward that source of utter indifference. She did not know, or did not acknowledge, the significance of the object, and yet he felt the impact of it clean through him.
It was an erotic thrill — the forbidden, there before him, and the awesomeness of her ignorance or indifference, holding the very essence of him. It was as though the whole of him was held in an uncaring hand, that which he had labored so hard and so long to produce about to come to its inevitable dissolution, to be washed away entirely by the action of a pitiless force that could be neither questioned nor stayed. She left the room, her massive buttocks shifting under her floral-print skirt, and he felt his halfhearted erection twitch. It reminded him that he had been with many women, each of them different from his mother in some important way. Even as he could not remember all of their names, he remembered their hands, worshiping him. Even the ones he had paid, who had afterwards pushed the money back towards him, eyes dewy and tearful. They were not his mother. They had all, each one of them, treasured his effluvia, as fascinated with it as he was himself. Some had even asked to watch him piss.
Pressing need made itself known. Outside, traffic droned, and from somewhere came the sounds of fighting. It might have been the upstairs neighbor beating his wife again, but he couldn’t bring himself to care. It was the hundredth time. The yelling was without rhythm.
He searched, now, for another sock, and found one like him, without a mate, rough and worn, toenail-torn holes gaping in it like unstitched wounds. A curious thing: this sock had never known his mother’s hands. She would have tried to make it whole, removing the only thing that made it all its own. It was stronger for the wearing. She would never understand.
He rubs his stubbled chin now, staring at the bulb, contemplating its filament obscured by the powder coating the inside of the glass. He neither believes nor disbelieves it is whole. He does not, any longer, even long to care.
The light flickers, then glares steadily. The connection, such as it is, has been made. From the smaller chair beside his comes a pleased sound. His wife, rereading his only novel for the hundredth time, has paused in her contemplation of his words, and registers her happiness. Now she can go back to her reading. The light is like her approval, there if he should need it, and subject to his will.
It is approval he does not want. Her hands are not his mother’s hands.
This was so on point it made my soul hurt. I salute you.
This is a masterpiece.
This mighty work of art.
How many male novelists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
A REAL man writes by whiskeylight.
God bless you Jokes. We like your interview!
http://storify.com/Mingnon/how-many-male-novelist…
How many male novelists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
It was as if he were to be surrounded by the dead bodies of the women he knew.
How many male novelists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
Humankind remains a stain on the earth, surrounded by all that he will inevitably contaminate.
How many male novelists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
Rape: The only constant that should remain in these kinds of stories. It is an inevitable thing, and so it shall remain.
Oh my Philip Roth, this is funny. Good Cormac McCarthy, I laughed so hard.
Hey Lisa this is what we were talking about!
R x
OK, here’s mine:
From his corner at the repurposed-wood bar, he sneers at the sound of bad prose. The trace of a smile graces his lips. Give up, old man, give up, let the young buck plow the field!! He peruses the barmaid. Eureka! The perfect phrase at last…. “Her legs were supple but marred by blue-ropey veins…” He would show it to her later that night when he picked up the chapbook she just typed for him.
The End
“I almost never sleep with American prostitutes any more, unless they really want me to – if they are going to get hurt if I don’t.”
The Paris Review – The Art of Fiction No. 163, William T. Vollmann (Fall 2000)
I CLICKED ON THIS ORIGINALLY BECAUSE OF THE PAPERBACK HERO THUMBNAIL. (sorry had to get that off my chest. :-P)
…and then I thought of all the guys whose Facebook wall I could post this on….in a not-so-subtle hint way…except they wouldn’t hear it, because of the loud sussurence of male angst crashing on the shores of their mind…
Wonderful comment! Could it be like sounds only dogs hear? Then again, women have no sense of humor, do we? See my Vollmann quote above. He reminds me of the kind of guy who makes icky comments in front of you when you are a working as a waitress/have to be nice cuz you can’t afford to quit your job. Check out Paris Review for whole interview. Double barf.
Oh, I am also “No. 1 Toast Fan” who made Vollmann comment above, in case of confusion. But seriously check out interviews in Paris Review and Newsweek (latter referenced in The Millions). Am I the only one who finds the synchronicity here strange and wonderfully hilarious? (Meh, maybe it’s just indigestion)
http://www.newsweek.com/lush-life-william-t-vollm… “Vollmann asks her (the waitress) which of us is the most handsome.. [POV Shift to Walk-On Character No. 1 “Pretty Waitress” – interior monologue: Oh great. He’s back. Hope they leave soon. Smile, smile, smile! The dang tip better be good. What a douche]
http://www.newsweek.com/lush-life-william-t-vollm… “Steak tartare arrives; when I ask him how it is, he says, “It’s the next best thing to cunnilingus.” [POV shift to Walk-On Character No. 2 “Peruvian Busboy Passing By Table” – interior monologue: Go to hell, pituco]
I'm ostensibly a white male novelist and this is the best thing. Just the best. I want to use it for a future survey course I'm snarkily referring to in my head as "Lonely Whiteboy Fiction."
She would never understand. She was not like his mother. She would inevitably have sex with him in a feminine way that was not like mother. God-penis. And misery.
…
Me too. And me too.
Wow, okay, I think I need to sit down after that.
…yes, yes, upon reflection, I definitely need to sit down. Being that I’m already sitting, I guess this means I’ll lie on the floor for a bit. No one mind me. Step over me to change the light bulb. I’ll be fine.
Are we talking about Henry Miller?!
That’s Tom Wolfe right?
These posts…it's like someone copied everything my roommate has me proofread and made them the butt of a joke. I like it. ANOTHER.
I revisit this about once a week, and I die every time.
Q: How many male novelists does it take to screw in a light-bulb?
A: The time had come for him to stare death in the face, to wrestle it into a humble submission while at the same time meditating that [4000 word observation that death cannot truly suffer defeat, for it has its way with us in the end]
Q: How many male novelists does it take to screw in a light-bulb?
A: -casually and yet critically he undresses with his eyes a strange woman he does not know, interprets her discomfort as buried desire, and consequently experiences contempt for her and her true nature and her innate need to be conquered-
Q: How many male novelists does it take to screw in a light-bulb?
A: He could not be considered to be classically handsome, but there was something in the wild of those eyes, the set of his jaw, the distinct architecture of the face that made him different, and that showed that his character had a fire within that could not be put out by all the conformity and evil in the society he was born in, and that inspired intrigue and also covert desire in the females he never gave a single glance at (for he was destined for things greater than passion).
Q: How many male novelists does it take to screw in a light-bulb?
A: His wife had yet to give him a son; and although he could not hold it against her, he wished that there could be a son among the mess of daughters he had now. There was a world that they could not hope to penetrate, a plane of existence that only a son could know when pulled into it by the firm hand of a father, etc.
I COULD GO ON FOREVER, I NEED TO LEAVE THIS PAGE, RIGHT NOW
Oh, this is too good. Bravo!
Q:How many male novelists does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A: He sat back in his chair watching the swirls of smoke flitter lightly through the trembling rays of the sunset. He took a slow, languid drag off his cigarette remembering the years of boyhood and his first smoke. He wasn’t very different now, he reflected. Still the same sweaty, insecure, and secretive deviant he used to be at twelve. Only one thing was different. One single thing was missing. His innocence.
😛
Q: How many male novelists does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A: NOT ALL LIGHT BULBS.
Thank you! 🙂
you have won the internet madame.
I am reminded of a somewhat similar joke:
Q: How many Vietnam veterans does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A: You don’t know, man! You CAN’T know, because you weren’t there!
Suddenly I realize that the line I am most fond of as a white male novelist (from my book “The Christmas Mutiny”) fits this list perfectly:
Q: How many male novelists does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: They had strung enough barbed wire for one night.
Thank you! 🙂
Somewhere the ghosts of Henry Miller and Norman Mailer are howling.
Someone’s obviously not been reading the good male novelists. Around here I suppose people prefer hoky Hallmarky crap like Maya Angelou, right? Hah.
She took a drag from her Woodbine and a long, sweet pull from her gin and tonic.
“The only good male novelist,” she rasped, “is a dead male novelist.”
She took a drag from her Woodbine and a long, sweet pull from her gin and tonic.
"The only good male novelist," she rasped, "is a dead male novelist."
Can you please come to Canada and teach that?
Someone has to show this to Murakami Haruki.