Chamblee54

I was repeating a story about AI … Author Insults, not Artificial Intelligence. An important link had gone dead, and needed to be refreshed by the Wayback machine. While there, I started to look through the comments.
Jean-Paul • Louis-Ferdinand Céline on D.H.Lawrence’s “Lady Chatterley’s Lover”:
“600 hundred pages for a gamekeeper’s dick, it’s way too long.”
William MacAdams • Virginia Woolf on James Joyce: “Ulysses is merely the scratching of pimples on the body of the bootboy at Claridges.”
 … Letter to Lytton Strachey, April 24, 1922
Jess • H.L Mencken on Gertrude Stein: “It is the great achievement of Miss Stein that she has made English easier to write and harder to read”
Cole • Mark Twain on Jane Austen: “Just the omission of Jane Austen’s books alone would make a fairly good library out of a library that hadn’t a book in it.”
PJ • Robert Louis Stevenson on Matthew Arnold:
“Poor Matt. He’s gone to heaven, no doubt, but he won’t like God.”
Colette Bancroft • Flannery O’Connor on Harper Lee: “I think for a child’s book it does all right.
It’s interesting that all the folks that are buying it don’t know they’re reading a child’s book.”
Tom • James Jones on Ernest Hemingway: “The problem with Papa was he always wanted to suck a cock. But when he found the one that fit, it had a double barrel.”
Retromash • “How is Harlan Ellison not on this list?” “Because he can only be entered on a short list.”
MousePotato • H.L. Mencken on Henry James:
“He writes with all the daring of a grandmother smoking marijuana.”
James • Mark Twain on Henry James:
“Once you put one of his books down, you simply can’t pick it up again.”
Tom • David Foster Wallace vs. Bret Easton Ellis:
“Is American Psycho Profound, Artistic Nihilism or Stupid, Shallow Nihilism?”
sourpuss • “Well, since we’re being lit’ry, don’t you think it might have been nice to have provided sources for the quotes? Maybe some credit to the compilers of various collections of literary invective?” … This is a problem for both Author Insults and Artificial Intelligence. You cannot believe what you see. Someone with too much free time could perform due diligence on this collection, and separate the truth from the fiction.
SMB • “I suppose Ambrose Bierce’s pithy “The covers of this book are too far apart.” could be recycled for general use. Don’t know what book he said that about …” I was delighted to see Ambrose Bierce included in this party, and wanted to see the context of that remark. A bit of googling led me to a story by the Quote Investigator. It turns out the quote was first attributed to Mr. Bierce was 1923, ten years after he disappeared in Mexico.
JC • “This article is plagarized wholesale from The 50 best author vs. author put-downs of all time. Trimming the list down does not make it original material. One would assume the author, Emily Temple, would at least acknowledge another source.” … This comment piqued my interest. However, it simply is not true. There were only ten duplicates in the two collections. The forty remaining quotes will be the basis of a forthcoming post, Author Insults Part Three. Pictures today are from The Library of Congress. John Vachon took the social media picture in May 1938. “Home supervisor showing Mrs. Pope how to keep account book, Irwinville Farms, Georgia” ©Luther Mckinnon 2026 · selah