The Pitiful Post

One of the best kept secrets of world's best spoof newspaper The Onion online is The AV Club, which features straight-up reviews, columns and interviews all very well done and good reads. I know I've previously mentioned the Wil Wheaton column on old video games.

I finally got around to checking in yesterday (regular updates are on Wednesdays) and discovered this week's interview with Daniel Handler (aka children's book author Lemony Snicket). It tells the story of how an author of adult novels came to adopt his pseudonym as the "broody, dour pseudonymous author of the gothic children's books collectively known as A Series Of Unfortunate Events." There's also a shorter interview with the aforementioned Snicket.

A former coworker introduced me to the Snicket books a few years back and I've read the first couple, which are entertaining and have many jokes and much wordplay that adults would appreciate. I recommend them. The recent movie starring Jim Carrey (who did a fine job as villan Count Olaf) was just so-so (a topic covered in depth by Handler, who worked on the movie's screenplay...then was fired from it...then came back at the end).

Handler says about the irony that his books are rife with:
"The trouble with talking about irony is, it's such a slippery thing that the second you start talking about it, you're a better example of it than you are an analyst. I do think of emotions as being on a circular path, so you can feel terrible and terrible and terrible, and then all of a sudden it becomes quite funny. So I think that has something to do with irony, and certainly has something to do with the part of that circle that the Snicket books investigate."

The AV Club [The Onion]
Where There's A Wil... [Jonworld]