Tag / Lord of the Rings

by Michael Janairo

ICYMI: #TrumpBookReports meet Middle-earth

Tr-mp in the final debate was bigly horrifying, should’ve been important, and yuge, but he was weak. Sad!

So if he loses, maybe he’ll disappear, but I truly fear that his biggest contribution will be to alter the English language. More and more people are adapting his braggadocious terminology in sarcastic ways — I’m sure you’ve heard it among friends, classmates, and colleagues, who are suddenly saying and/or writing “yuge” about the mundane things.  A high school reunion was touted on FB as “it’s gonna be huge. It’s gonna be phenomenal. The other classes all wish they could have a reunion this great, actually.” This mock braggadocio *is* fun, but will it go away when Tr-mp is no longer on TV everyday? Or will it linger, and the sarcasm end, and it will become an embedded and accepted part of language, with its users in a few years forgetting its origins?

For book-lovers, one of the best things to come out of this endless campaign are the #TrumpBookReports on Twitter. Lots of people have written about To Kill a Mockingbird (“I could stand in the middle of 5th Ave & kill a mockingbird and not lose votes” from @LemonsandLaughs), Death of a Salesman (“I prefer the salesmen who DON’T die” by @dreamweasel), and Shakespeare plays (“Hamlet? Such a disaster. Can’t decide to be or not. Bigly indecisive. And Ophelia? Not my first choice.” by @KDanielGleason).

My favorites, though, deal with “Lord of the Rings,” because I could never see Tr-mp reading the books, many of the jokes are very insidery, and it proves Junot Diaz’s theory in his brilliant novel “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” that one of the best lenses upon which to make sense of a dictator’s evil is “Lord of the Rings.”  Considering how much has been written and said about Tr-mp as being not only a bully and a strongman wannabe, but also authoritarian, the connection seems apt for this period of the political campaign.

With that in mind, here is a curated selection of #TrumpBookReports featuring “Lord of the Rings.”

https://twitter.com/chelsealindsay/status/789238355653332992

https://twitter.com/CharlieAndyFitz/status/789114469351698432

https://twitter.com/JustinDVaughn/status/789254705931177984

https://twitter.com/mind_butter/status/789252426842906624

https://twitter.com/mrglenn/status/789242913397932032

https://twitter.com/IdrisAdamjee/status/789228735547346945

https://twitter.com/Gonzo_Ed/status/789179335777267717

by Michael Janairo

Book review: ‘The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao’

This review originally ran in the Times Union in September 2007.

oscarwaoWow! Or should I say “Wao”?

Junot Diaz‘s long-awaited debut novel “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” (Riverhead Books; 335 pages; $24.95) is the best book I’ve read this year.

The story traces a fuku, or the “Curse and the Doom of the New World.” Oscar, an overweight first-generation New Jersey kid, is way into J.R.R. Tolkien,Japanese anime and science fiction (he’s writing aspace opera). But he and his family are cursed.

His grandfather, a respected doctor in the Dominican Republic in the 1950s, feared his beautiful teenage daughter would catch the eye of dictator-for-lifeRafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina. Trujillo ruled from 1930 to 1961 and was known to rape the daughters of prominent citizens.

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