Find and Replace Public Domain Gone Mad...Celebrity Chekhov

BLOT: (11 Aug 2011 - 06:11:35 PM)

Find and Replace Public Domain Gone Mad...Celebrity Chekhov

One of Harper Collins 20-for-20 ebooks (as in, they have 20 different ebooks for only 99 cents apiece, and you can buy them as you want without having to get them in package, for the month of August) is another case of public domain copy-paste Madlibs. This time, the "writer" (i.e. Ben Greenman) took Anton Chekhov's works and swapped out character names for current celebrities. Most of the reviews are big praises, except for this lonely 1-star number, here, but I'm not sure. It sounds like a person trying for at best an experiment and at worse, a pointless shredding of the classics. Maybe I am wrong. Maybe these are completely revisioned tales just taking hints from the original works...but a brief look suggests otherwise.

Take this example, the Chekhov original, "Fat and Thin's" opening paragraph:

Two friends -- one a fat man and the other a thin man -- met at the Nikolaevsky station. The fat man had just dined in the station and his greasy lips shone like ripe cherries. He smelt of sherry and fleur d'orange. The thin man had just slipped out of the train and was laden with portmanteaus, bundles, and bandboxes. He smelt of ham and coffee grounds. A thin woman with a long chin, his wife, and a tall schoolboy with one eye screwed up came into view behind his back.

And, now, the Ben Greenman version, "Tall and Short":

I am having trouble figuring out who the target audience is for this. People who love celebrities AND Chekhov? People who need to be tricked into reading Chekhov. English Lit majors who have read Chekhov's stuff so much that they will consider this humor? Hipsters?

By the way, if you do want to read some Chekhov...here you go: via Project Gutenberg

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OTHER BLOTS THIS MONTH: August 2011