Jennifer L. Knox Is Invited, Retroactively, to My Wedding

By Tom

The mashup and the cover version may be reaching their peak in the digital age, but poet Jennifer L. Knox (whose most recent collection, Drunk by Noon, would certainly have been a contender for Best Cover of the Year in 2007 if we had had such a competition, and if I had known it existed at the time) shows that you can commandeer authorship of a cultural object the old-fashioned way: with a Sharpie and some glue. Apparently (it's hard to separate the spurious from the serious with her), she missed the wedding of two friends and, as a belated gift, prepared for them a doctored version of Mark Bittman's eminently useful How to Cook Everything, with her name substituted wherever possible as author, and a new, foul-mouthed "Acknowledgments" section pasted over the existing one. No sign that she altered any recipes...

And one of the more family-friendly passages from the acknowledgments:

[My father] worked for 53 years as head chemist for Animex, developers of all the animals in Mexico. My father's landmark experiments led to the development of a cow small enough to pack in carry-on luggage--making starvation on airplanes a thing of the past.

(On The Hypothetical Library, via Eat Me Daily and an anonymous tipster) --Tom