Ann Coulter : Human Document

inevitable decay of stupid joy

2011-07-09T11:52:00.000-07:00

From Ann Coulter's "Casey Anthony: Single Mom of the Year!"

We Spit in Your Dangerous Utopia

2010-07-16T14:44:00.000-07:00

From Ann Coulter's "Kagan Hearings Surpass World Cup for Most Boring TV Event"

stop the universe and maybe it would be fun

2010-07-02T10:22:00.001-07:00

From Ann Coulter's "What a Sack of Sacrosanct"

I’m OK. just OK honestly

2010-06-26T10:31:00.000-07:00

From Ann Coulter's "Alvin Greene: The Most Qualified Democrat I've Ever Seen"

THE SECRET CHE

2010-06-19T11:49:00.000-07:00

From Ann Coulter's "Sarah Palin: Please Endorse Rob Simmons"

panic forever

2010-06-10T10:06:00.000-07:00

From Ann Coulter's "Did You Plug the Hole With a Blue Dress Yet, Daddy?"

Sex For a city

2010-06-03T15:17:00.000-07:00

From Ann Coulter's "Modern Civil Rights: Cockfighting and Same-Sex Proms"

Protecting Our American Swag

2010-05-24T11:59:00.001-07:00

From Ann Coulter's "Republicans On Track to Snatch Defeat from the Jaws of Victory"

the Supreme secret

2010-05-19T12:49:00.000-07:00

From Ann Coulter's "Supreme Court to Face Mecca"

Europeans were absurd

2010-05-11T16:52:00.000-07:00

From Ann Coulter's "Obama National Security Policy: Hope Their Bombs Don't Work"

all about the Rich existence

2010-05-03T16:11:00.000-07:00

From Ann Coulter's "Washington Takes Break From Porn Surfing to Bail Out Wall Street"

Coulter Makes Cover of “Barack the Barbarian”

2010-04-30T09:28:00.000-07:00

A Chicago publisher, Devils Due, is releasing a politically-themed swords and sorcercy comic book, "Barack the Barbarian," by Larry Hama, Chris Schons, and Joel Humberto Herrera. The buffed Obama character fights a succession of villains based on real-life political adversaries such as Sarah Palin and Dick Cheney. Issue 2 (available here) finds Barack battling a "Screeching Enchantress" who's clearly intended to be Ann Coulter. According to the Devils Due website,

"Barack begins his assault on the Elephant Tower by entering the dreaded Labyrinth of Right Turns guarded by the Screeching Enchantress and her many-headed dogs. Meanwhile his other enemies plot and scheme and work their dire magicks."

a history of mist

2010-04-25T16:24:00.000-07:00

From Ann Coulter's "Wouldn't a Mini Series on Atilla the Hun Explain Nancy Pelosi?"

Turn Off the Light to the World

2010-04-20T10:59:00.000-07:00

From Ann Coulter's "Stevens: 'I Never Left Sanity. Sanity Left Me'"

words are basically the end of emotion

2010-04-14T10:16:00.000-07:00

From Ann Coulter's "God Hates Judges"

where anxiety will be no escape

2010-04-04T09:06:00.000-07:00

From Ann Coulter's "Prescriptions for Disaster Now Covered Under Obamacare"

so much was preceded by a bikini wax

2010-03-26T16:06:00.000-07:00

From Ann Coulter's "Oh, Canada!"

the Mormons Are Approaching

2010-03-21T11:07:00.000-07:00

From Ann Coulter's "My Health Care Plan"

Prepare for a Criminal just like you

2010-03-12T15:29:00.000-08:00

From Ann Coulter's "What's Arabic for 'You're No Atticus Finch'?"

how to hide money from teenage girls

2010-03-05T16:44:00.000-08:00

From Ann Coulter's "Subprime Mortgage Crisis Hits Whorehouses"

ALWAYS FIB

2010-02-28T23:37:00.000-08:00

From Ann Coulter's "What Part of 'Party of No' Don't You Understand?"

Love is humiliation

2010-02-20T09:07:00.000-08:00

From Ann Coulter's "Ahmadinejad: 'Yep, I'm Nuclear!'"

regular American habits of the lost

2010-02-15T11:57:00.000-08:00

From Ann Coulter's "Obama Is Owned - You Can Bank On It"

stuff that’s very bad

2010-02-09T15:06:00.000-08:00

From Ann Coulter's "Matthews and Olbermann Now Openly Fighting Over Obama"

I Remember…

2010-02-07T15:54:00.000-08:00

…when my high school handed out tattered paperback copies of Madame Bovary for us to to read. A friend of mine discovered that he could position his fingers over parts of the book's title so that it would read DAM[N] OVARY. This was considered the apex of wit.

screaming capitalism

2010-02-01T15:40:00.000-08:00

From Ann Coulter's "Can't We At Least Get a Toaster?"

time was just anything

2010-01-25T18:46:00.000-08:00

From Ann Coulter's "That Old Obama Magic Is Back"

If this gets denied

2010-01-15T09:47:00.000-08:00

From Ann Coulter's "Harry Reid's Negro Problem"

Crimestoppers Textbook

2010-01-09T10:54:00.000-08:00

Jerome Rothenberg's "Poems and Poetics" blog has a reminiscence about the somewhat legendary incident in which "Dick Tracy" cartoonist Chester Gould threatened to sue Jess for "Tricky Cad" (above). Jess [Burgess Collins, 1923-2004] was an atomic scientist turned beat-era artist. One of his collages, "Tricky Cad," is a comic book composed entirely of cut-up text and images from Gould's syndicated strip. This was the 1950s, when comic strips were big business and the law on appropriation was moot. Writes Rothenberg,

When O! [the book they were publishing] was nearly done & ready to pass along to the offset printer, Jess raised the sometimes dicey question of permissions. His secret wish, he said, was to make contact with Dick Tracy's creator Chester Gould, who was one of his longtime heroes, & this would give him a chance to do so. I gave him the go-ahead, only to hear a few weeks later that Gould had not only denied permission but had threatened to sue all of us, if I remember it correctly, for every cent we had. There was a lesson in all of that, but in the face of Gould’s threats, which he could afford better than we could, the only choice we had was to retreat. Jess therefore constructed a marvelous comic-style centerfold, “That Sly Old Gobbler or the Orange,” carrying forward the Victorian imagery, and it took a legal/judicial change in the status of parody & appropriation before Tricky Cad was finally – & safely – published.

Rothenberg appends several Tricky Cad images (which are still hard to find on the Internet). For another Gould-sets-the-artiste-straight tale — involving Robert Crumb — take a look at this strip by by Jay Lynch (who was a participant) and Ed Piskor.

their usual howls

2010-01-09T10:32:00.001-08:00

From Ann Coulter's "If You Can Find a Better Deal, Take It!"

The Devil’s Looking For Another Reagan

2010-01-04T09:14:00.000-08:00

From Ann Coulter's "Ivana Trump Escorted Off Plane: Napolitano Declares 'The System Worked'"

sooner or later, there’s no free anything

2010-01-02T11:12:00.000-08:00

From Ann Coulter's "Less Health Care for More Money"

universal night

2009-12-29T17:54:00.000-08:00

From Ann Coulter's "In Other Words…"

for crimes this column did

2009-12-11T14:18:00.000-08:00

From Ann Coulter's "Martha Coakley: Too Immoral for Teddy Kennedy's Seat"

according to the mean things

2009-12-04T17:42:00.000-08:00

From Ann Coulter's "Do Smoking Guns Cause Global Warming, Too?"

hypothetically, the tornado

2009-12-02T12:52:00.000-08:00

From Ann Coulter's "MSNBC Exclusive: Fort Hood Never Happened!"

Hurt in Elmhurst

2009-11-27T09:57:00.000-08:00

Via Ed Park's Disambiguation, a photo of that Elmhurst hospital sign.

whatever happened to Nicolas Cage

2009-11-20T17:06:00.000-08:00

From Ann Coulter's "At the End of the Day, Diversity Has Jumped the Shark"

Neon Burnout

2009-11-19T11:13:00.000-08:00

Two letters of the illuminated sign for Elmhurst Hospital Center, Queens, have burnt out, leaving " lmhur t" — or "I'm hurt," reports The New York Times. Said hospital spokesman Dario Centicelli, "Thank goodness our name is Elmhurst instead of some other name where it could go out really bad."
There's no photo of the hospital sign, but the article contains a link to this invaluable archive of accidentally "treated" neon signage. The piece also mentions the long-running use of the concept in film:

In the 1992 film “Batman Returns,” Catwoman smashes the “O” and “T” on a sign that says “Hello There!” leaving a more ominous “Hell Here.”

The cartoon family the Simpsons once stayed at a Sleep-Eazy Motel, where a burned-out “E,” “P” and “E” rendered it into a more accurate and descriptive “Sleazy Motel.”

And in the 1942 Abbott and Costello film “Who Done It?” a shootout turns “Vote for Townsend Phelps” to “Send Help,” which again gets shortened simply to “End.”

There are many more movie, TV, literature, and video game usages here. Most tantalizing revelations:

The entire premise of [manga comic] Aoi House is that the initial "Y" fell off the sign.

"Tony Hancock's film The Punch and Judy Man, set in a seedy English seaside resort, has a scene where Hancock's title character is shaving just before performing at an important reception at the town hall. His faulty electric shaver shorts out some of the town's illuminations, causing them to spell out insults."

slim in Arkansas he wasn’t

2009-11-15T10:25:00.000-08:00

From Ann Coulter's "Muslim Suffers Bruised Ego in Fort Hood Tragedy"

the immeasurable chutzpah of emo

2009-11-06T11:30:00.000-08:00

From Ann Coulter's "Election 2009: Change I Can Believe In!"

LICK FOR TOGE

2009-10-31T12:59:00.000-07:00

From Ann Coulter's "I'll Pass on 'Opting Out'"

they know about the brochures

2009-10-23T11:20:00.000-07:00

From Ann Coulter's "The Grating Communicator"

that gay part of warfare

2009-10-17T11:48:00.001-07:00

From Ann Coulter's "Natural-Born Losers"

evil Sweden!

2009-10-09T17:26:00.000-07:00

From Ann Coulter's "Lib lies about national health care, Part 7"

the main causes of Britney Spears

2009-10-03T06:11:00.000-07:00

From Ann Coulter's "A Statistical Regression Analysis of Maritime Unemployment Rates, 1946-1948. Just Kidding -- More Liberal Lies About National Health Care!"

Bonus Joe Brainard Edition

2009-09-29T10:00:00.000-07:00

In last week's column, Ann Coulter used the phrase "I remember" three times. This led me to attempt Joe Brainard's game of "I remember" — on top of the usual Tom Phillips treatment, of course.
For the uninitiated, Joe Brainard (1942-1994) was an American artist and writer of the Pop era. Like Phillips he created a meme that now serves as the point-of-entry to a diverse, media-spanning oeuvre. In Brainard's case, the meme is "I remember." You start a sentence with those two words and add a pithy reminiscence. Some examples will explain better than explication can:

I remember the only time I ever saw my mother cry. I was eating apricot pie.

I remember my first erections. I thought I had some terrible disease or something.

I remember planning to tear page 48 out of every book I read from the Boston Public Library, but soon losing interest.

I remember my parents’ bridge teacher. She was very fat and very butch (cropped hair) and she was a chain smoker. She prided herself on the fact that she didn’t have to carry matches around. She lit each new cigarette from the old one. She lived in a little house behind a restaurant and lived to be very old.

In other hands, "I remember" would be mere nostalgia. Brainard took the idea and produced what Paul Auster called "a masterpiece... one of the few totally original books I have ever read." I Remember first appeared in book form in 1970. It was followed by sequels (including a 1973 I Remember Christmas commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art) and compilations. The latest edition of I Remember is available from Granary Books.
Even Brainard's many fans may not know that there is an unusually fine Joe Brainard website. ("From an early age Joe showed artistic talent, winning virtually every art contest he entered. He even designed his mother's dresses.") Brainard is associated with the New York School poets — he collaborated on hilarious comic strips with Frank O'Hara. As a visual artist, Brainard is best known for his takes on the cartoon character "Nancy," paintings of flowers (done simultaneously with Warhol's but more hypnotic), and collages. Brainard was incredibly prolific. He took amphetamines to speed his output, and one gallery show had 1500 of his works. (They were very tiny). After 20 years of intensive work, Brainard stopped making art to focus on reading and going to movies. Above is one of Brainard's later works, Blossom, from 1974.
John Ashbery wrote that Brainard "proves that beauty is really interesting after all."

I remember

2009-09-28T11:15:00.000-07:00

From Ann Coulter's "Liberal Lies About National Health Care, Part 5"

This American writhing

2009-09-19T08:03:00.000-07:00

From Ann Coulter's "Liberal Lies About National Health Care: Bonus Joe Wilson Edition"

we'll have surly neighbors

2009-09-11T15:54:00.001-07:00

From Ann Coulter's "Liberal Lies About National Health Care: Fourth in a Series"

eliminate everything

2009-09-03T14:12:00.000-07:00

From Ann Coulter's "Liberal Lies About National Health Care: Third in a Series (Commemorative Plates on Sale Now!)"

Who’s Who

2009-08-29T06:30:00.000-07:00

Back in the LP era, Tom Phillips' art appeared on album covers. The most prominent example is Brian Eno's 1975 Another Green World. The cover image is a small detail of Phillips' painting After Raphael. The album's lyrics were created by a cut-up technique in which Eno listened to nonsense syllables and formed them into words.

Phillips also did one of the portraits on the cover of The Who's Face Dances (1981). Peter Blake, best known for creating the Beatles' Sergeant Pepper cover, commissioned a cross-section of British popsters to contribute: David Hockney, Richard Hamilton, R.B. Kitaj, Howard Hodgkin, Allen Jones, Patrick Caulfield -- as well as Phillips and Blake himself. Can you tell which portrait is by Phillips? (There's a telltale clue, barely visible if you click for the larger view.)

Death wasn't American

2009-08-28T12:50:00.000-07:00

From Ann Coulter's "Liberal Lies About National Health Care: Second in a Series (Collect All 10!)"

ex cop and a lot more

2009-08-20T05:02:00.000-07:00

From Ann Coulter's "Lib lies about national health care: First in a series"

don't get started making Google Money

2009-08-14T13:46:00.000-07:00

From Ann Coulter's "Kathleen Parker: The Barry Lynn of The South"

Monster Mad-Libs

2009-08-11T10:37:00.000-07:00

[Editor Jason Rekulak] "had these lists, and on one side he had a column of War and Peace and Crime and Punishment and Wuthering Heights and whatever public domain classic literature you can think of. And on the other side he would have these phenomena like werewolves and pirates and zombies and vampires. He called me one day, out of the blue, very excitedly, and he said, all I have is this title, and I can't stop thinking about this title. And he said: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. For whatever reason, it just struck me as the most brilliant thing I'd ever heard."
—Seth Grahame-Smith, co-author (with Jane Austen) of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.

Finally, Due Anxiety

2009-08-10T13:24:00.000-07:00

From Ann Coulter's "Obama's Birth Certificate Spotted in Bogus Moon Landing Footage"

Escape From N.Y.

2009-08-03T16:00:00.000-07:00

Today's puzzle picture: Find the Ann Coulter book title in this 2007 collage by Dash Snow.

zen as We find it

2009-07-31T09:33:00.000-07:00

From Ann Coulter's "How About a National Conversation on Race Hoaxes?"

Take Your cornucopia

2009-07-26T16:46:00.000-07:00

From Ann Coulter's "Take Two Aspirin And Call Me When Your Cancer is Stage 4."

Tom and Ann, BFF

2009-07-26T10:05:00.000-07:00

The coincidences keep multiplying. I just learned by Googling that there's another Tom Phillips who is chairman of the National Conservative Campaign Fund (NCCF). The NCCF site has photos of Phillips schmoozing with guest speaker Ann Coulter during a 2003 fundraiser. Caption: "NCCF Chairman Tom Phillips raises a toast to conservative victory with Ann Coulter."

emo panic

2009-07-18T19:39:00.001-07:00

From Ann Coulter's "Dems to GOP Nominees: Will the Defendant Please Rise?"

Keep Food Away From Reading Material

2009-07-16T07:28:00.000-07:00

• Oscar Wilde's copy of W.H. Mallock's The New Republic has a jam stain on page 30 (as I learned via Jenny Davidson's Light Reading). Biographer Thomas Wright wrote that Wilde "gorged himself on books and food simultaneously."
• The inverse, in a way: Ed Ruscha's 1966 painting, Annie Poured from Maple Syrup (above).

Googling Mallock

2009-07-12T10:03:00.000-07:00

Google Books scanned the Stanford University Library's copy of W.H. Mallock's A Human Document. Through some glitch, an ectoplasmic blur partly obscures the book's title. The revealed fragment (UMENT) suggests the question, "You meant?" — a suitable epigram for Tom Phillips' game of playing with authors' intentions.

TRY GETTING MORE

2009-07-11T09:11:00.000-07:00

From Ann Coulter's "Forgetting Sarah Palin."

Ann Coulter and W.H. Mallock: Stranger Than Fiction

2009-07-09T17:45:00.000-07:00

• In 2006 The New Republic published "A Defense of Ann Coulter," which some liberal readers took to be a satire. Mallock's first novel was a satire titled The New Republic.

• Coulter: Slander: Liberal Lies Against the American Right (2002). Mallock: A Critical Examination of Socialism (1908).

• Mallock's 1889 article, "Cowardly Agnosticism: A Word With Professor Huxley" argues that Darwinian science constitutes a "new religion" — almost exactly the thesis of Coulter's Godless: The Church of Liberalism (2006).

• In a 2007 CNBC interview, Coulter said that Christians "just want Jews to be perfected," prompting one conservative blogger to call her a "rabid ANTI-SEMITE" (RecoveringLiberal.com). Mallock's A Human Document contains "extremely distasteful anti-semitic passages" (Tom Phillips).

• Mallock wrote the cryptically titled A Human Document. Coulter is Legal Affairs Correspondent for the oddly named website Human Events.

written to say the least

2009-07-09T17:44:00.000-07:00

From Ann Coulter's "So Much for Wise Latinas."

F.A.Q.

2009-07-09T16:04:00.000-07:00

Q. What's the point?
A. It's a simple word game, invented by Tom Phillips, where you take a text and erase everything except a few words forming random phrases the author never intended. This site uses Ann Coulter's weekly columns, as they appear on the web (left). No text is added, but it's okay to use part of a word (right, where Hispanic becomes panic).

Q. Who is Tom Phillips?
A. Tom Phillips is a British artist and poet best known for A Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel (first exhibited 1973). After reading about the cut-up technique of William S. Burroughs, he found a used copy of a 1892 novel, A Human Document, by W.H. Mallock, and began a project of crossing out or painting out most of the text, leaving chance phrases. The result, a key work of concrete poetry, has been extensively exhibited and published several times in facsimile form. You can find a lot more about Phillips on his site and blog.

Q. Who is Ann Coulter?
A. Ann Coulter is an American writer and pundit, known for conservative political views and a caustic persona. Trained as an attorney, she writes a syndicated column, is a best-selling author, and is frequently seen on American television. You can find out more at her site and in the Wikipedia entry.

Q. What is a "humument"?
A. It's Phillips' contraction of "A Human Document," from the running heads in Mallock's novel. This image, from page 5, shows the origin. Phillips felt that humument "had an earthy sound to it suitable to a book exhumed from, rather than born out of, another."

Q. Why pick on Ann Coulter (if that's what you're doing)?
A. I have a blog recording that odd kind of dream in which you get an idea that seems completely brilliant in the dream. The next morning, you realize how stupid it is. On the Fourth of July 2009 I had this dream:

Everyone was talking about the clever new website that takes Ann Coulter's words and subjects them to the Tom Phillips A Humument treatment — producing random phrases of great wit and poetry.

In the morning, I realized that this idea (though stupid) was easily realized. This site is the result.

Q. Why are there two different images for each Coulter column?
A. Each is half a "treated" Coulter article. Blogger and some browsers have problems displaying tall, narrow image files, so I split each in two.

Q. Who is W.H. Mallock?
A. British novelist William Hurrell Mallock (1849-1923) wrote numerous well-received novels, articles, and polemical works. Today he is remembered, if at all, for his unintentional role in A Humument.