But wait: I know lots of "funny stories." It's what makes me that sweet lettuce, knowing all sorts of them, or at least able to talk about them good. <insert book plug here: ed.>
Read MoreNow on JSTOR
Go here and get it, and/or demand it from your institution.
Chris Rock interview
Mo Rocca interviews Chris Rock: of note is his discussion of preachers and the influence on his stand-up. Preaching as a riffing style is part of it, but the ethnopoetics are also a factor, especially among black comedians. Bruce A. Rosenberg's The Art of the American Folk Preacher was a big influence on my understanding of stand-up, and one day I need to develop the oral-formulaic theory as it relates to the routines. Meanwhile, ethnopoetic transcription is the only way to make the stand-up's words live on the page.
Special thanks to bestie Andrea Kitta (@andreakitta), who not only wrote the definitive book on the anti-vaccination movement but also watches CBS Sunday Morning as if her life depended on it.
Total sellout. #humblebrag #afsam14
So they only brought fifteen copies, so it's not a cray-cray accomplishment, but at today's book launch every copy of A Vulgar Art got sold. The amazeballs folks at University of Mississippi Press borrowed my copy for the rest of the conference so they could have something on display.
SUCK IT, ALICE WALKER!
Now available
Checking the list price for someone asking about it (so NOT pathetically self-googling, but constructively self-googling myself), I see that as of October 29 Amazon lists A Vulgar Art as available for order, not just pre-order. So buy it.
But folkies, it'll be at AFS in Santa Fe at the launch on Wednesday (Nov. 5) with all sorts of AFS discounts, and maybe signatures.