Dibs

In 2004, Neal David Sutz of Scottsdale, Arizona sued Dr. Phil McGraw and Paramount after refusing to sign a document allegedly required of all the TV show’s audience members specifying that they are not mentally ill or under psychiatric care. Sutz talked about his suit on Howard Stern’s show, and plugged his documentary film-in-progress about bipolar disorder. Now he wants to give away 45 million free copies of his bipolar recovery guidebook, Kick It With Gusto, via his blog, BipolarDisorderWeb.com. A veritable depressive Renaissance man, Sutz is also the author of This Is Your Captain’s Wife Speaking and 101 Ways to Get Noticed at an LA Stoplight. He claims his latest publicity stunt is the largest free-book giveaway in America’s history. He says he picked the 45-million figure because that’s the estimated number of Americans with depressive disorders. He says he’s giving books away because his fellow sufferers “need to not have money stand in the way.” On his blog, he reminds himself to take his medication, and writes longingly of poker. “People need to understand that mental illnesses are brain disorders and are physiological just as much diabetes is a physical disorder,” announces Sutz in a press release. “730,000 people try to kill themselves every year in this country and 30,000 succeed. Ninety percent of those people suffer from a diagnosable mental illness. This is more people than died of AIDS last year. Mental illness is a serious problem in America and we need to do something about it.  This blog and this book are my part.” Yeah, but isn’t reading really hard when you’re really depressed?

Tempers are flaring in Australia, where a wildly controversial author has just been appointed to the board of the national broadcasting corporation. Keith Windschuttle is a University of New South Wales professor and historian whose 2002 book The Fabrication of Aboriginal History boldly claimed that his fellow historians conspired to fib in misrepresenting their nation’s past: that in the service of political correctness they created a false picture of violent, racist white settlers that Windschuttle says is far from the truth. The book sparked pyrotechnical debates now known in Australia as the “History Wars.” According to the Adelaide Advertiser, Windschuttle’s appointment to the ABC board has been called “a new low” by Senator Stephen Conroy of the Labor Party, who dubs Windschuttle a member of “the legion of conservative cultural warriors.” The wars continue.

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In this lushly sensual new venture by the Harvard-grad (and hot) author of last year’s lesbian-coming-of-age-in-India tour-de-force Babyji, a reclusive and long-celibate Indian author decamps to France, where he meets in the flesh his biggest fan, previously known only online. The ensuing summer is one of achy waiting, of funny only-in-France snark (one character, the narrator notes, pronounces the “t” in croissant) and of a man past his prime looking both forward and back. Dawesar has a super knack for writing about sex — even when the sex isn’t happening. Hopefully this elegant effort will spark readers who never heard of the brilliant and saucy Babyji to buy it as fast as their sweaty little fingers will let them.

Grade: B

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She’s on trial in London for murdering an old woman, and 18-year-old Kemi Adeyoola claims that the pile of notes which lawmakers are calling her “murder manual” are instead the manuscript for a novel-in-progress. She wrote the notes while in jail for shoplifting when she was sixteen. After serving that sentence, Adeyoola became a prostitute, then was arrested for murder after her DNA was found on 84-year-old Anne Mendel’s corpse and the teen was taped attempting to negotiate a bribe that would have given her an alibi. Now the jail-notes are being used as evidence in her murder trial. According to Life Style Extra, she told the court yesterday that being in jail for shoplifting “was the first time I had truly been placed away from my family against my will. I was bored, frustrated, a bit depressed. I had always considered writing a book. I’d like to be an author.” The title of the manuscript was Making Life Count. It included weight-loss targets, a resolution to take driving lessons and buy fake academic-achievement certificates on the Web. It also describes stalking and robbing an old lady, then beheading and dismembering her. In court, Adeyoola explained: “I was 16 and had never written anything before. I’d been reading crime thriller books … and it fascinated me and I thought I’d give it a go…. I wanted to do something important while I was in custody and I thought writing a novel was pretty important.” The notes included lists of equipment such as a butcher knife, guns and tranquilizer pills. She told the court that these were for her fictional character to use in the fictional crime: “This was to be a crime thriller, a murder was to take place.” She denies murdering Mrs. Mendel.

In a bold marketing move, the Prime Shine Express Car Wash in California’s agricultural San Joaquin Valley area has released its first comic book, Adventures of Prime Shine Man: Attack of the Pesky Critters. In the book, brightly colored birds and insects (“Miss Kito,” “Superfly,” “Chuck Berries,” etc.) assault a jeeplike vehicle whose young-couple inhabitants wail, “Who will save us?” Hunky and sporting a shock of golden hair, the titular hero, according to carwash.com — a news site for car-care professionals — “closely resembles Evan Porges, general manager of Prime Shine and son of Prime Shine founder Norm Porges, although the identity of the superhero will remain a secret.”

When he’s not fomenting Mexican revolution as the spearhead of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN), appearing sporadically masked with knives at his waist and a bullet-belt slung around his neck, accompanied by his deformed-rooster mascot, elusive guerrilla Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos is a novelist. Due in September from New York’s Akashic Books, The Uncomfortable Dead is a “highly anticipated surreal noir collaboration between Mexico’s greatest writer and its most courageous revolutionary,” according to a press release. Coauthored with award-winning mystery writer Paco Ignacio Taibo II, it’s “an uproarious murder mystery” in which “an odd but charming mountain man” meets a Coke-swilling sleuth in Mexico City’s mean streets, where both find themselves “in an unpredictable dance of death with forces at once criminal, historical, and political. Readers expecting political heavy-handedness will be disarmed by the humility and playful self-mocking that runs throughout the book,” Akashic reassures us. Neal Pollack, blurbing the book, adds: “It’s a singular event in world literature.”

It’s not all about Downward-facing Dog, headstands and the Lotus position. Psychotherapist and yoga teacher Cope reveals that there’s more to the ancient Indian practice than just postures and breathing techniques. He focuses instead on the Yoga Sutra, a guide to proper living, eating, thinking and speaking penned some eighteen centuries ago by the sage Patanjali. Mixing personal anecdotes with lessons from the Sutra, Cope makes the modern Western mind (surprise!) seem muddled, misguided, sad and sometimes even sinister. We’re selfish, isolated, “stranded on an island of our own making. An impostor Bali Hai.” We lack restraint. We lie through our teeth. If you want to know more about the foibles of Cope’s pals, about how yogis of yore solved their problems, and about how to “get out of your own way,” this is a talky meditation guide that won’t work a single kink out of your knee- or ankle-joints.

Grade: C+

Her book The Piano Teacher features a protagonist who slashes her private parts with a razor blade, urinates in the street when she gets turned on, and begs her young lover to beat the hell out of her. Translated into English from her native German, typical lines from her books include “Erika is baked inside the cake pan of eternity” and “He roasts his hefty sausage in her oven, in its flaky pastry case of hair and skin” and “His articulated penis roars to a standstill in the lay-by of his wife.” She’s Elfriede Jelinek — Austrian Stalinist, feminist, novelist, playwright, and winner of the 2004 Nobel Prize in Literature. (She didn’t attend the ceremonies because she said she suffers from social phobia.) Many were shocked by her winning the Nobel: first because her writings tend toward the gross and second because few outside of Austria have ever heard of her. Jelinek’s brand-new work is Bambilandia, which has nothing to do with a cute fawn. It’s an anti-Iraq War Spanish-language theatrical monologue from Destino Publishing in which George W. Bush is called Jesus W. Bush. Aeschylus and Nietzsche are invoked, and an electronic translation leaves a bit to be desired (or does it?), as this excerpt appearing in El País reveals: “Where went to stop all that low-achieving petroleum? It burns. It burns. Explosives around wells where suspended petroleum burns without sense…. To who managed to be saved of the current of the brackish sea, to that one at least we would kill it. Our house can burn, can burn the images with our Gods, but not our petroleum, not our television set, we must conserve it, our altar cannot disappear without leaving track, because it is the track! … Spur attacks against unmanageable boats.”

We’ve already told you about Stephen Baldwin’s born-again memoir. But who knew that the whole Baldwin fam-damn-ily was harboring a lit lust? Alec Baldwin wants to publish a book, A Promise to Ourselves, about his messy divorce from Kim Basinger. But the blonde My Stepmother Is an Alien star filed a motion earlier this year to stop her ex from attaining his authorial dream. He claimed to be writing it as a helpful guide for others struggling with divorce and custody tangles, and to expose the legal system’s anti-dad bias. She claimed it would be an exposé. The artillery increased last week when during yet another hearing a Superior Court commissioner said she wanted a trained psychologist to examine Baldwin and determine whether he has been trying to brainwash the couple’s daughter, Ireland, against Basinger. (How? By making her repeat over and over, “In Wayne’s World 2, Mommy played a character named Honey Hornée”?)

The Christian Deer Hunters Association publishes a prayerbook with antlers and venison in mind. On offer at the CDHA’s Web site, Devotions for Deer Hunters includes ninety devotionals by forty devout shooters, produced by the Minnesota-based nonprofit whose stated goal “is to reveal and encourage a Biblical World View approach to deer hunting. Some of the things that a Biblical World View will help to stimulate or encourage include:

• An awareness that deer hunting can be an excellent opportunity for sharing the Gospel of Jesus Christ with other hunters (Mk. 16:15-16).
• The proper view towards those who are in authority, such as DNR officials (Rms. 13:1-7).
• Proper treatment of game after it has been harvested (Prov. 12:27).
• The importance of faithful church attendance and involvement during the hunting season (Heb. 10:25).
• A wiser use of time spent while actually in the field hunting (e.g. Scripture reading, memorization, prayer, witnessing).”

CDHA founder and president Tom Rakow muses: “the North American hunter [is] an Endangered Species. Why are many people currently opposed to hunting? The answers to such a question would probably be too numerous to tabulate. But a primary reason for the anti-hunter attitude that exists today can be traced to the increasing influence of Eastern thought on our society. Such religions as Buddhism and Hinduism have made the concept of coming back to life in different forms very popular. This idea which is known as ‘reincarnation’ is presently being propagated through the New Age Movement. Let’s face it. Even taking the life of a rat is difficult if there remains the remote possibility it was a relative of which you were previously fond. But the Judeo-Christian principles upon which this country was primarily founded do not teach reincarnation. In fact, they teach just the opposite. God’s word makes it clear we have one life.” The organization offers another book too, Hunting for a Father.