Bathroom reading: What’s in your wallet?
Books come in all shapes and sizes and perform all sorts of functions, in addition to acting as containment vessel for reading “matter.” And almost anything can function as bathroom reading. Where else memorize your credit card numbers? Now, it turns out, almost everything is worth the paper it’s printed on.
Japanese horrorist Koji Suzuki has a new short novella called Drop printed on toilet paper.
The cult film The Ring is based on one of his scary stories, so there is a certain inevitability to his penning a toilet bowl tale. As bathroom reading goes, that may take the cake. I’ve seen dollar bills printed on t.p., filthy lucre, and I can guess the face of Mona Lisa has been printed there to.
Bathroom reading does have its horrors, its downsides, its backsides. Remember the Seinfeld episode where George hauls an expensive art book, French Impressionist Paintings, off to the toilet at Bretano’s, is forced to buy it, and then can’t get rid of the contaminated book?
Careful what you borrow. Not to worry reading a post, of course. Though “blog” is suggestive, as is the “upload” function necessary to feature the photo of Suzuki, above.
Back in my day on the Great Plains (this would have been the early 1950s) most of my farmer relatives had outhouses where the reading fare there was last year’s Sears, Roebuck and Co. catalog, also the t.p. Wishes and dreams gone down well.
Drop, apparently, is a scary thriller set in a public restroom, takes up about three feet of paper, and can be read in a few minutes or strung out over the course of several sittings.
Touche!
May 26th, 2009 at 8:36 am
Good grief, first frontal nudity in marble, then a scatological scat, what next on this family blog? Poet Rosellen Brown used to tell the story of another poet, nameless, writing to a critic about a bad review: “I am sitting in the smallest room in my house. I have your review in front of me. I will soon have it behind me.” And so it um goes…
May 26th, 2009 at 4:50 pm
But how do you read it? — rolling it off the holder from the top, or from the bottom? I’d hate to read the ending first by accident.
May 26th, 2009 at 6:28 pm
When I’m reviewing a book I read first chapter, last, second, pentultimate, and so forth, in that order; gives me a better sense of it to analyze and weigh - but, I usually end up somewhere near the middle, and it this case likely a fold.
May 26th, 2009 at 6:30 pm
And on that note, I fold, too. The pot is yours.
May 27th, 2009 at 12:14 pm
While on the topic of oddball print media, I just read about a Swedish magazine, Tare Lugnt, which published its third edition by tattooing it on the left leg of the zine’s editor/publisher Marc Strömberg. I hope he had a good copyeditor.
WSJ coverage here:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124231802136020049.html
May 27th, 2009 at 1:57 pm
Hey MTC: my son in law is a tattooist and he’s damned careful about what he makes permanent believe you me–I remember him in anguish over having to tattoo a gray wolf (as opposed to a timber wolf) on someone’s thigh because he could only find a picture of the latter, when the former was what had been ordered. Who knew…
May 29th, 2009 at 3:01 am
JERRY: (Reading the cover of the book George was forced to buy) ‘French Impressionist Paintings’?
GEORGE: I find the soothing pastorial images very conduc-