It Ain't Abuse If You Don't Call the Cops -- The Enduring Wisdom of 50 Shades of Grey

Yes, I read Fifty Shades of Grey. After about four months of waiting, my turn finally came up at the library, and against my better judgement, I checked the thing out. Truth be told, it wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be, seeing as I was prepared for Fifty Shades of Grey to be the worst book ever. It’s certainly better written that Twilight (though that's not saying much). But mostly, I was just confused by it, by its unparalled success – who are these millions of women who are avidly reading and recommending Fifty Shades of Grey? Okay, it wasn’t terrible, but it certainly was ridiculous. And fucked-up. And culturally damaging. And juvenile, which strikes me as odd considering it was written by a woman in her mid-40s. The dialogue was juvenile and ridiculous. Anastasia’s “cute” and overly repetitive quirks – like biting her lip, rolling her eyes, and her vocal inner goddess and subconscious – were ridiculous. I mean, the girl’s lucky she’s got any lip left. The sex scenes and Anastasia’s instant orgasms were ridiculous – so much so that if I was supposed to be turned on, it didn’t work because I was too busy rolling my eyes. And don't get me started on Christian Grey...

If you're not familiar with the premise, Fifty Shades of Grey is the tale of the naive Anastasia Steele, whose world is rocked when she takes up with the handsome, sexy billionaire Christian Grey. Ana manages to meet this god when she interviews him as a favor for her roommate shortly before her college graduation. She’s instantly attracted to him and can’t believe it when he seems to take a liking to her, too – because she’s plain and clumsy and boring, of course. They go through a little flirty-flirty, but they’re both in for a shock – she’s a virgin, and he only enters into Dominant-Submissive sexual relationships that come with a contract. In short, he's looking for someone he can abuse in his Red Room of Pain, and Ana spends the rest of the book hemming and hawing over whether or not she wants to participate.

 

Apparently this is the housewife fantasy. Which makes me really sad because at its core, Fifty Shades of Gray puts forth a really destructive message for women, one we've been fighting against culturally for a really long time. Seems like this is more than a few steps back.

 

Throughout Fifty Shades of Grey is the oft-repeated trope of the ugly duckling being turned into a swan because of a man’s “love.” Anastasia spends the entire book insecurely wondering why the devastatingly handsome and rich Christian Grey is attracted to her. “I am rendered speechless by the look of hunger in his eyes. Wow … to be this wanted by this Greek god.” (358)  It doesn’t matter that he has deep-rooted psychological issues that will damage her emotionally and physically – He’s rich! He’s handsome! He must be too good for her! Ugh.

 

And then beneath that, Fifty Shades of Gray presents the disturbing premise that beating your partner is arousing, not abusing – because hey, she doesn’t call the cops, right? He actually suggests at one point that it’s all in how you look at it, that maybe it’s only society telling her spanking/punishing (i.e. physical hurting) your partner is bad. Despite the overwhelming evidence that Ana should run for the hills, she's convinced that her love can fix him. That when he says he doesn't do the girlfriend thing and he's bad for her, he actually means the opposite. 

 

E.L. James uses this ugly duckling fantasy -- rich, handsome god-man falls in love with Plain Jane, recognizing her special specialness, breaking all of his austere rules because even though he's damaged, love makes him want to reach out -- to cloud the main issue. “I want to hurt you. But not beyond anything that you couldn’t take.” (376) There are a couple of passages like this, and all I can think is: HE STILL WANTS TO HIT YOU! The rest is bullshit. But what is Ana's response? “This is a man in need. His fear is naked and obvious, but he’s lost … somewhere in his darkness. His eyes are wide and bleak and tortured. I can soothe him, join him briefly in the darkness and bring him into the light.” (377) God, bring back the vampires – this shit is toxic.

 

And the thing is, Fifty Shades of Grey only works because of Christian Grey’s superficial qualities. Strip away the youth, the wealth and the handsome face, and all you have a man who gets insanely jealous when his girlfriend talks to another guy, stalks her movements through her cell phone, is a complete control freak, and  gets his sexual kicks from fully dominating and beating his girlfriend (but only in places where others won’t see the bruises). Wow, so erotic. Usually, you have these types of guys arrested. So why has this book become housewife porn? Anastasia literally only recognizes these superficial things once. ONCE. And the second she admits it, she goes into the whole, oh, poor him, he’s so damaged, my heart hurts for him. Perhaps you think I’m irrationally angry because Fifty Shades of Grey is just a book, but the thing is, I’ve been there. And you know what happens? It doesn't matter how rich or handsome he is. You can’t heal his wounds with love. He just keeps abusing you. And it makes me so angry that this woman has made like $20 million peddling the idea there’s something erotic or sexy in that.

A Game of Thrones is really about Turks

There was a funny story about Game of Thrones in a Turkish newspaper earlier in the month. Supposedly (and this is a very important word for stories concerning the military's bad behavior),  officers at a school in Izmir showed the series to a group of teenage boys in an English-language class at a military academy. After they'd wrapped up the lessons, 10 weeks later, someone anonymously complained about it, saying Game of Thrones "involved 'corrupted and perverted' sex scenes and depicted Turks as 'a barbarian tribe with perverted religious rituals'."

It's really unfortunate because the parts with the Turks were my favorites. I think everyone was drawn to how they -- oh, wait a minute, I must be thinking of something else BECAUSE THERE ARE NO TURKS IN GAME OF THRONES. My only guess is that someone decided the Dothraki were the Turks (of nearly 1,000 years ago) in disguise and got their panties twisted into a bunch. 

According to this story, nine officers were accused of sexual abuse and "insulting Turkishness," which is in fact against the law in Turkey. The charges were dismissed until the Minister of Defense personally overruled the charges, and supposedly this ridiculous case is in progress.

To read or not to read: 50 Shades of Grey

I'm trying to decide whether or not to read 50 Shades of Grey, and I am genuinely conflicted. On the one hand, I think it's important to read what the masses are reading -- I think that's part of the definition of being well-read -- and with the author having earned a reported $20 million paycheck, the masses have clearly read and spoken. So with that thought in mind, I put myself down in my library's request system for 50 Shades of Grey, resolved to read it. All I'd really heard about it was that it was an erotica version of Twilight, but even more poorly written -- which is what was giving me pause, as we all know how I felt about the ending of that series, but still, I was resolved.

And then, by chance the other day, I came across a teeny excerpt (beware -- naughty words ahead): “Does this mean you’re going to make love to me tonight, Christian?” Holy shit. Did I just say that? His mouth drops open slightly, but he recovers quickly. “No, Anastasia it doesn’t. Firstly, I don’t make love. I fuck… hard. Secondly, there’s a lot more paperwork to do, and thirdly, you don’t yet know what you’re in for. You could still run for the hills. Come, I want to show you my playroom.” My mouth drops open. Fuck hard! Holy shit, that sounds so… hot. But why are we looking at a playroom? I am mystified. “You want to play on your Xbox?” I ask. He laughs, loudly. “No, Anastasia, no Xbox, no Playstation. Come."

That paragraph was just brutal. I'm just not sure I can do it, runaway bestseller or no. What I may do is write my own housewife erotica to earn my own $20 million, but I am just not sure I can stomach this one. Life is short, and I already resolved not to read any more books that I knew from the outset would likely be bad.

On the bright side, I am patron 197 out of 334 on my library's waiting list -- they only have 12 copies, so I guess I have some time to decide.

Has anyone read it? Thoughts?

Oh my, O magazine, say it ain't so!

I was flipping through the June issue of O magazine recently when I came across the most shocking error. And rest assured, it was shocking -- just you wait for it. It was in Martha Beck's monthly column, this one titled "Charting Your Course." The article is actually really interesting, which is why it's a shame that the introduction -- touching upon the journey of Odysseus -- completely blunders the tale. Oh, I told you it was shocking.

She opens the article with, "Odysseus just wanted to go to Ithaca. No, not the one in upstate New York -- the one in ancient Greece. He dreamed of it the whole seven years he spent trapped on the island of the nymph Calypso. Eventually the pitying gods ordered Calypso to free him, at which point he managed to build a boat and set out on what he hoped would be a brief and pleasant journey."

Okay, so far, so good. But then...

"Ha. At every turn, Odysseus' travels were filled with surprises. He conquered monsters at sea only to find worse ones waiting on land. He encountered seductions that sent him half mad with longing. Finally, in the land of the dead, he got clear directions from a seer who, oxymoronically enough, was blind."

But, er, umm...the thing is, when he's freed from Calypso's island, Odysseus pretty much is at the end of his journey. All the events listed in the article have already happened to him; at this point, all he's got to do is get through a little storm at sea and a mini-vacation with the Phaeacians. The reason for the mistake is obvious enough -- in terms of chapter order, Odysseus is first seen sitting on Calypso's island (in chapter 5) before running around on all his adventures (chapters 9-12), but books 5-12 don't follow chronological order. But I didn't expect to see such a mistake in a major magazine. It's nice to see the Odyssey mentioned, I suppose, but it's also kind of a :( for classic lit.

Let's take the Entertainment Weekly book quiz

I subscribe to Entertainment Weekly's Shelf Life blog on Google Reader and I noticed earlier today that they seem to have started an occasional feature called the EW Book Quiz. A book quiz - what fun! From what I could tell, they've only done three installments, with Jackie Collins, then Mindy Kaling, and most recently Gregory Maguire. The questions have been similar but not always the exact same.

I love quizzes like this - Vanity Fair's Proust Questionnaire springs to mind - and I thought we could play along. Leave your answers in the comments!

EW Book Quiz (with questions compiled from the three interviews):


1. What was your favorite book as a child? This is a really hard one because I had so many favorite books as a kid. But I'll have to go with a couple of Madeleine L'Engle books. I absolutely loved the Wrinkle in Time series which was full of vocabulary words I didn't know and made me feel smarter (kid-level astrophysics, yo!) and A Ring of Endless Light which convinced me that I could communicate with dolphins if I tried hard enough (and I tried once at Sea World in Orlando and felt like I was just inches of brain power away from success). My current favorite book for children is the awesome Pirate Soup.

2. What’s a book you come back to over and over? I don't usually read books more than once but I've read The Great Gatsby, Sleeping Tiger, and Eat, Pray, Love twice each because they give me the warm and fuzzies. I'm also pretty passionate about Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist and even more, The Pilgrimage, and read them when I feel the need for some serious spiritual guidance and a jumpstarting of faith that everything will be alright.

3. Is there a book you’ve never read that, for whatever reason, you’ve pretended to have read? This hasn't happened since college when I was enrolled in a Russian lit class. We were reading Anna Karenina or War and Peace (can't even remember which) and my roommate stole my copy off my shelf and gave it to her best friend. When I went looking for it, she confessed but was pretty mean about it, saying that I wasn't using it so it was hers for the taking. So I had to pretend I was going to read it so that thieving bitch would give me my property back. Still haven't read either of them though War and Peace is on my revised list for the remainder of this year.

4. What’s a classic or much-hyped book that you’ve never quite understood the merits of? The Scarlet Letter, The Crucible, and The Stranger. Omg how I hate those books. Even worse, because I changed high schools, I had to read The Scarlet Letter twice and The Stranger three times, absolute torture. As for modern-day books, pretty much any Oprah selection fits the bill.

5. What is a book you would kill a bug with? Seems like Atlas Shrugged would be big enough to kill a mouse even.

6. What’s a favorite book that you’ve read for school? It's not a favorite per se but Julio Cortazar's freaky short story "Axolotl" has stayed with me since I read it in a college Spanish class. It's about a man who has a special moment with a salamander. I also gained a newfound appreciation for the merits of Dracula in a feminist Gothic lit class.

7. Which fictional character do you most identify with? I really have no answer for this; I don't usually connect with characteers this way. I like them often but I never feel like they're me - except maybe for Vicky Austen, the dolphin-loving heroine mentioned above.

Now it's your turn!

Three Cups of Tea: True or False?

I've been pretty fascinated by the brouhaha over Three Cups of Tea since the controvery hit about 10 days ago but I've resisted posting because I don't know what to believe. Anyone else with me on this? But I'm starting to doubt Greg Mortenson's intentions, mostly because his new explanations aren't holding up either - and if that turns out to be the case, I'm angling for my $10 back, to spend it on a piece of fiction that actually says fiction. [Full disclosure: I personally know all the Outside people mentioned herein as I used to work at the magazine.]

In a nutshell, author Jon Krakauer and 60 Minutes go after Greg Mortenson on two main points: that he fabricated significant events in Three Cups and that he has mismanaged his charity's funds, both refusing to document expenses and using the charity's dime to promote his books and then pocketing the proceeds. The first charge, that he made up events - including the origin story of how he wandered into the Pakistani village of Korphe and discovered his life's mission - appears to be true. In an interview with Outside editor Alex Heard, Mortenson blames his co-author David Oliver Relin, saying that he synthesized events to create a stronger narrative and no one cared when Mortenson complained. To the second charge, Mortenson acknowledges in the same Outside interview that he did use charity funds to charter a jet for the sake of time management, that people are misreading the charity's tax records, and that an independent law firm has established that they've done nothing wrong.

I think I've fairly synthesized both sides of the argument...and it's still hard to know what to believe. In a lot of ways, it's a he-said-she-said involving a very remote part of the world. Add in a heap of commentary from everybody from the New York Times to your ordinary blogger (hello, world!) and the water just keeps getting muddier and muddier. Interestingly though, Mortenson's side has remained mostly quiet in the face of some pretty damning financial evidence. (If you read Alex Heard's interview, you'll see on pages 4 and 5 that Mortenson doesn't deny using the charity's funds or refute Krakauer's main argument; rather, he justifies it in the way that many of his Internet defenders have, that the ends justify the means.)

I think it's fair to say that Greg Mortenson had good intentions to change the world but he lost them in the hustle-and-bustle along the way. The mismanagement of the charity seems pretty well documented. Whether he absentmindedly misplaced those intentions when things got too big or discarded them when he became a millionaire remains to be seen.

Personally, I'm leaning toward the "changed by fame" interpretation - but then, I was never a big fan of Three Cups of Tea. As I said at the time, the text struck me as manipulative, like a very long PR manifesto. But the biggest issue now, it seems, is that Mortenson's new and improved explanations don't seem to hold water which in my opinion is the thing that makes him look the most guilty.

Take the debate of the origin story, how he got to Korphe and how long he stayed there. In the greater scheme of things, it's probably irrelevant if Relin condensed the incident. But the fact remains, as the 60 Minutes mash-up (start at minute 1:30) adequately proved, that Mortenson repeats Relin's version of the story on tour as truth. Now, he blames Relin for the inaccuracy and says he voiced concerns - but if that's true, why keep repeating an inaccurate tale? (Interestingly, in an interview with the University of Oregon's Etude in 2008, Relin gives a remarkably different account of how he and Mortenson came to work together, compared to Mortenson's version in the Outside interview.) But now it seems that the revised version of the Korphe tale - which Mortenson provided to Outside - isn't plausibly true either. A second Outside article posits that geographically, the facts don't line up.

What can I say, I have a hard time having faith in someone whose story keeps being disproved. I don't know what the truth is, but it's not looking good for Mortenson.

Oprah Chooses Dickens

Oprah recently selected Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations as her new book club picks. Clearly, I was so excited about this news a month ago that I didn't rush to post anything about it. Meh, Dickens. I've never read anything by him and I know it's a gaping hole in my literary education but...meh, I just can't get up the enthusiasm for it. I've previously attempted both of these books and never made it past page 5.

So why am I posting, you ask? One, because I posted about Freedom as her last pick and I'm trying to be more consistent with ye olde blog. But mostly because I ABSOLUTELY LOVE the cover design of the Oprah Dickens edition. I love it so much that I am considering buying it, despite the fact that I already have copies of both books...and no interest in actually reading them. (Apparently most people don't agree with me: USA Today reported that the new edition failed to crack the Top 50 on the bestseller list, theorizing that people already own these books or realize they can get them for a lot less or even for free on e-various readers.)

Apparently there's been quite a hubbub over the suitability of these classics for the average American reader. Hillary Kelly of The New Republic felt that Oprah is leading millions of the unwashed tribe astray by suggesting Dickens as a holiday hot-chocolate companion. Alan Jacobs of Wheaton College presents the counter-argument on his blog that any reading is always worth it; Beatrice.com calls Kelly's view profoundly elitist. I think all arguments have some merit - Dickens is probably not the right choice for this particular audience and I dislike the cattle mentality of Oprah's book club and yet...reading is good. So if you should choose to take up the gauntlet, I must point out that Oprah.com has posted a high school-esque reading guide to get you started.

Predictable: Oprah Picks Franzen

Yes, all-powerful Oprah announced her book club pick yesterday: Jonathan Franzen's Freedom. It was a suprise to absolutely no one - not even to me, and I gave up on her endorsed books years ago. (I love her magazine but god help me if I don't want to poke my eyes out reading one of her modern-day book-club picks. I see the Oprah Book Club logo and I drop the book and run. Seriously.)

So, Jonathan Franzen...really? I don't think Oprah is obligated to pick poor, starving authors but c'mon, the man was just on the cover of Time-frickin'-magazine. If you know how to read, you know about this book. Plus, Franzen was too cool for Oprah school the first time around, when she picked The Corrections in 2001. He's already astronomically famous and apparently ungrateful...so why help him out, again?

Susan Orlean agrees with me. Yesterday she tweeted, under the hash tag #thatsmytwocents, "No bone to pick with Franzen, but Oprah could have anointed someone who actually NEEDED attention."

Um, yeah.

The Sisterhood of Mean Girls

So, as I was Googling to try and verify that the Sisterhood girls did indeed go to different schools in the first book, I came across a very disturbing story about how Ann Brashares came to write The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. Although I first read the account on Wikipedia, it seems to be well substantiated in outlets I trust, like Gawker and The New York Observer (although the link no longer exists).

According to these sources, a young woman named Jodi Anderson used to work at Alloy Media + Marketing, a company which connects products to a targeted audience...and the audience seems to be teen girls. (I'd always wondered why the company published books and sold clothes, and now I know!) Anyway, in the book division, Alloy works as a packager, coming up with marketable ideas and outlines and then hiring a writer to produce an actual book. Anderson apparently came up with the Pants concept, based on her own experiences of sharing a pair of pants with her college girlfriends, and she thought she was going to be chosen to write the book, since it was her idea and all - but Brashares, co-president of the company, decided to write it instead. Anderson has since written her own book (actually multiple books), but none have been anywhere near as successful as The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants series. She apparently has also not commented on the matter.

This makes me ill. I'm always amazed at what people are willing to do to one another. No doubt Anderson's employment contract stated that Alloy owned any and all ideas and could do what they wanted with them, but I don't think it excuses it. No matter what the legalese says, you're still building your success on somebody else's inspiration. The contract is a way of making everyone who profited feel better. My old boss essentially tried to do the same thing, although I had already left the job so there was no contract to bind - but he had been a crafty litttle devil when he'd signed his, and owned every new concept, no matter which staffer came up with it. He said to my face that he was claiming ownership over everything with an implied and what are you going to do about it? Thankfully, I was smart enough to tell him to shove it.

Anyway, I found all this Alloy information by way of articles and blogs about Kaavya Viswanathan, the high-schooler-turned-Harvard-student whose first novel, How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life was a bestseller containing a great deal of plagarism. Viswanathan also worked with Alloy publishing and according to Slate (via The New York Times), her original novel involved Irish history - not the un-dorking of an Indian girl trying to get into Harvard (which is kinda-sorta Viswanathan's personal tale). No one really seems to blame book packaging for the plagarism; I think it's more frustration, seeing people write best-sellers and earn themselves fame and fortune in the process, only to find out there's unhandedness involved (because I think we could all write bestsellers if given a concept and someone else's book to lift from). As one of the literary agents involved said, per the Boston Globe: "We had all recognized that Kaavya had the craftsmanship, she's beautiful and charming, she just needed to find the right novel that would speak to her generation and to people beyond her years as well." Her original concept wasn't good enough, so they gave her a new one. OMG, and apparently she got half a million dollars for it, too. Kill me now. (Even worse, the Amazon reviewers mostly trash it, controversy aside.)

This blogger talks mostly about Opal Mehta but also briefly about Ann Brashares:
http://avastconspiracy.blogspot.com/2006/05/dirty-chick-lit-secret-exposed-in.html

Ann Hulbert on Kaavya Viswanathan:
http://www.slate.com/id/2140683/fr/rss/

The New York Times on book packaging:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/27/books/27pack.html?_r=1

Rob Pattinson's Confessions

Yes, I'm blogging about Twilight again, mostly because Rob Pattinson has become my new favorite person. Not in that screaming-teenager-please-Edward-bite-my-neck kind of way, but because it seems it's no-holds-barred with this kid...which I find totally refreshing as the Twilight mania careens way out of control. I mean, I like the series, but it's not Shakespeare. And I'm a little concerned that teenagers can't seem to tell the difference between an actor and a fictional character. Get a grip, girls!

Anyway, Pattinson recently gave an interview to E!'s Ben Lyons about his take on the series' popularity. While looking totally nervous and running his hand through his artfully disheveled hair, he says, "When I read it, I was convinced Stephenie was convinced that she was Bella, and it was like a book that wasn’t supposed to be published. It was like reading her sexual fantasy..." And I realized, he is so right. Stephenie Meyer created Twilight from a dream that she had where she met the most perfect man she had ever laid eyes on in a clearing. He was amazing, sure, but the most amazing part was that he loved her. Isn't that every girl's fantasy? (Not to mention the plot of every makeover teenager movie in existence?) The dream was so vivid and strong that Meyer even remembers the date. She wanted to hold onto it so she started writing it down. The result, of course, was the phenomenally bestselling Twilight. It's not an especially well-written novel; I do think its appeal, like the VC Andrews books, is its fantasy aspect...and I don't just mean the mythical creatures. Pattinson totally hit it on the head, and I can't believe I hadn't thought of it before.

You can watch the clip here:
http://www.eonline.com/uberblog/lyons_den/b68229_rob_pattinson_on_whats_weird_about.html

Seinfeld's Head on a Plate

In poking around the Internet just now, I came across a new story about Jessica Seinfeld, Missy Chase Lapine, and veggie-gate. Apparently, Lapine filed papers on Tuesday explaining why she was suing the Seinfelds in the first place, in preparation for a December hearing.

Lapine charges that Jessica Seinfeld knowingly plagarized her cookbook, The Sneaky Chef, when she published her own, Deceptively Delicious, about six months later. From what I've read, it's not even possible that Seinfeld stole from the book; publishing schedules are such that Seinfeld's book was basically done and on its way to the printer when Lapine's came out. I've also seen arguments that since the idea isn't original to Lapine, you can't accuse someone else of taking it. When this first developed last year, I did see a story that convincingly argued that perhaps HarperCollins took the idea, which Lapine had pitched them, and gave it to Jessica Seinfeld, knowing that her celebrity would sell the book. (And it did; Seinfeld's only qualification to write a cook book to feed kids is that she's a mother who cooks.) But more recently, that theory seems to have been debunked.

But still, I hope the Seinfelds get their asses handed to them in court. Their behavior, their arrogance, has just been abominable since this story came out. Personally, I've been shocked with what they've been able to say about Lapine; even more, I'm surprised that people like Barbara Walters and David Letterman have allowed the Seinfelds to come on their shows and say what they want about this woman, when Chase has virtually no media voice at all.

In these recent papers, Lapine explained that her daughter was alarmed after Jerry Seinfeld's stint on Letterman last year, when the so-called comedian said that people with three names turn out to be assasins. He also labeled Lapine a wacko. In a statement, Seinfeld's lawyers this week said, "As a comedian, Jerry has a right under the First Amendment to tell jokes. Ms. Lapine, on the other hand, was not joking when she maliciously accused Jessica Seinfeld, who also has young children, of plagiarism, a charge that is demonstrably false.'' But the thing is, I saw that Letterman episode. If Seinfeld was making jokes, it didn't come across as humor; it seemed pretty clear to me that he used his opportunity on national television to defame this woman and shoot her down. But you can decide for yourself; watch the clip on, ironically, Defamer: http://defamer.com/hollywood/revenge-comedy/seinfeld-to-letterman-whats-the-deal-with-that-crazy-woman-my-wife-stole-all-her-cookbook-ideas-from-316797.php

Twenty days later, Jessica Seinfeld went on The View to promote her cookbook and make more snide allegations about a woman who does have a legitimate gripe with her. (It may not be true, but there are striking similarities between those books that shouldn't just be brushed aside.) Jessica told Barbara and clan that Lapine is just jealous because she, Jessica, got to promote her book on Oprah. You can watch Jessica's tour-de-force here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2007/11/19/jessica-seinfeld-on-plagi_n_73306.html

All I can say is: unbelievable. I used to love Seinfeld but I find this feeling of revulsion welling up in me whenever I see his mug now. He needs to go away and take his attention-seeking wife with him.