With Halloween being only a couple of days away,the real fear factor seems to hitting the bookstores these days and not in the expected horror section. The dubious darling of MTV's The Jersey Shore is launching yet another book onto our literary shores and this claims to be non fiction(in a rather loose sense of the term).
Entitled Confessions of a Guidette , Snooki offers up her own guide to living life via fashion tips(bronzer is a must),entertainment ideas(“A guidette has to know how to have fun anywhere. Like, if you’re stuck in a cardboard box, you have to rock it.”*)and wardrobe suggestions such as “LOVE my slippers. It’s like wearing beds on your feet.” *
*actual quotes from the official promo for this tome-I sadly kid you not
What really has some folks riled up is the new trailer for Confessions of a Guidette where Snooki stops by her publishing house to see if they're ready to raise awareness for National Guidette Day(that's a new one on me). It's very much like watching a Saturday Night Live skit that was a stinker from the get-go but the actors have no choice but to go through with it anyway.
My favorite bad moment of this awful promo is when Snooki saunters down the row of featured authors hanging on the wall and snidely labels them as either "nerds" or "grenades"(which is not a compliment,I assure you). Notice how all of the faces are blurred out-guess they wanted to make sure none of their regular writers would be tempted to have a throwdown with Miss Snooki at a future publishing party:
What really irks most people about this trailer is how the publishing house female executives seem to be all too willing to play along with this rather tired routine. Hopefully,these ladies were given some sort of compensation for their role here and never have to do this again,for anybody.
It's hard to decide which is worse,that this new Snooki book is a guide to life or that her debut novel A Shore Thing doesn't give credit to Valerie Frankel,the chick lit author who actually wrote it.
Then again,she may not want this on her resume and I can't say that I blame her too much. At the moment,it seems to be a Snooki world that we're all just living in:
On the other hand,this isn't the first time a television personality has come out with a book,either based on the fictional character they play or otherwise.
Back in the day,there were books based on shows such as Upstairs,Downstairs and Twin Peaks,both fictional and pseudo non fiction. That trend has continued today with characters from shows like Parks and Recreation,How I Met Your Mother and Mad Men promoting books written by them within their series.
"But Snooki is real,sort of!" Yes,but that never stopped anyone from blurring the lines between reality and television and even reality stars are not exempt from that. After all,if the mystery series Castle can not only put out novels supposedly written by the leading man on the show and have actual mystery writers give their mock endorsements,who's to say that Snooki and friends don't have the right to shill their scribblings as well?:
"Come on,Lady T,you know these books are junk!" No argument from me on that score but I would like to point out that making a big fuss over Snooki's books is more of a help than a hindrance to her budding career as a writer.
Yes, I find it annoying that someone who is famous for not doing much of anything is able to land a nifty publishing deal like this but in the big picture,these books are just like her claim to fame-very fleeting and not made to last long.
Junk food for the mind is only bad if you make it your sole mental diet. One of my favorite books as a kid was 1983's Miss Piggy's Guide to Life,which is naturally out of print these days. A very silly book,to be sure,but one that I was truly happy to have at the time.
Granted,Miss Piggy is a tad smarter than most of the reality show bunch but she does share a sense of grandiose in common with them,so they would be able to get along pretty well,I would imagine. Miss Piggy is still out there with a new guide to life every so often(the most recent was in 2009,The Diva Code)and while I have no desire to read it,it's nice that a new generation of her fans get to. I highly doubt that we'll be able to say the same for Snooki or her other Jersey Shore cohorts:
So,what I'm really saying is that while Snooki is gleefully promoting her less than tasteful to most of us titles,it's better to laugh than to cry about the whole thing. Her day in the sun will end soon enough and with any luck,she and her other friends will have a new version of Hollywood Squares to hang out in.
Besides,trying to stop even bad writing only adds fuel to the fire within the delusional writer's ego and encourages him or her to resort to an "any means necessary" approach to getting their work out into the wider world. Quality may be preferred in the arts but sometimes,persistence pays off more:
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