Tuesday, October 26, 2010

The Case for Nutcase Literature


Booktryst has a fun post on weird books written by weirder people.

From the post...

Like chillaxin’, the word nutcase has gotten a heavy workout within the last few years, used so indiscriminately that its true meaning has become lost and the word worn thin. It is often confused with and substituted for wing-nut, a subspecies of Homo Politico, recently flourishing on the far Right of the political spectrum but not exclusive to it. As my old friend from Texas, the self-proclaimed and proud Librarian to the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy, relentlessly enjoys pointing out to me, it was the far Lefties of the 1960s and their antics that were the real wing-nuts. There’s enough truth in her assertion that what remains are mirror images blind to recognizing their flip-side reflection.

What, then, constitutes a nutcase book?

Singularity and oddity. It can’t be the current flood of titles from Tea Partiers and Rightward media commentators. There are too many of them, too similar, and issued in huge print runs by mainstream publishers. By definition, a nutcase book cannot appeal to a large, popular audience. Possessing a strange title is not enough, nor, necessarily, a strange subject. The anonymously written How To Boil Water in a Paper Bag (1891) is out there but not so far that it is utterly implausible.

A nutcase book must be in a class by itself, possessing a certain j'nais se WTF?

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