Open Threads

Justin Halpern’s twitter-stream Sh*t My Dad Says has (of course) been turned into a dead-trees book. Luke Jennings, at the Guardian online, is amused but not impressed:

When 28-year-old writer Justin Halpern split up with his girlfriend, he moved back in with his parents in San Diego, California. His father, a specialist in “nuclear medicine”, did his best to be accommodating. “All I ask is that you pick up your shit so you don’t leave your bedroom looking like it was used for a gang bang.”…
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Justin Halpern started posting his father’s sayings online. Then he started a Twitter page, “Sh*t My Dad Says”, and within a short time literary agents were calling, TV producers inviting him on to their shows, and reporters asking him for interviews. A book came out, and earlier this month it hit No 1 on the New York Times bestseller list, edging out Laura Bush’s memoir. When Halpern told his father this, the reaction was phlegmatic. “Trust me,” Halpern Sr said of Bush. “She doesn’t give a fuck. She could have you killed.”
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From the sparse handful of details vouchsafed us in this glib, self-engrossed account, Halpern Sr comes across as an extraordinary and heroic figure. Born into extreme rural poverty, he qualifies as a doctor, serves in Vietnam and goes on to become a distinguished cancer specialist, whose lectures are attended by oncologists in their hundreds. If his world view is that of a scatalogically inclined Samuel Beckett, he’s earned the right to it, and his pronouncements are anything but shit, or even Sh*t. When he says, of his son’s friends: “I like them. I don’t think they would fuck your girlfriend, if you had one,” you’re hearing the voice of a man who’s seen too much to bother with the niceties.
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By contrast, there’s almost nothing to get to grips with in the son’s story. By his mid-20s he’s worked shifts at Hooters, a catering franchise involving greasy chicken wings and waitresses in high-cut shorts, and decided to “try his hand” at screenwriting. Moving to LA, he finds no takers, a fact that will come as no surprise to readers of this book, though it stokes Halpern’s own neurotically inflated sense of victimhood. Back in San Diego, he tries to move in with his girlfriend and, quelle surprise, she dumps his slacker ass.
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At which point he posts the dog’s asshole quote and the multimedia phenomenon kicks in, with Halpern Sr, possibly suspecting that lightning will not strike twice, refusing to take a cent of the proceeds. Earlier this week I glanced at Halpern’s blog and was amazed to learn that his father, years ago, wrote a book about his time in Vietnam, which he, Halpern, has not yet read. Was this indolence, I wondered, or the apprehension that a real understanding of his father’s past might expose the whole Sh*t My Dad Says exercise for what it is?

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