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LRB blog

Cosy and Warm

Thomas Jones · 'Go the Fuck to Sleep'

For a while in the mid-1990s you couldn't walk through a university town without seeing at least one young man in a black T-shirt covered in text that claimed to be the Bible verse Ezekiel 25.17. Actually it came from the 1970s movie Karate Kiba, which is where Quentin Tarantino lifted it from to give to Samuel L. Jackson's character in Pulp Fiction. The boys who bought the T-shirts have now grown up and had children – or maybe they've just had children – and the audiobook version of the spoof bedtime story Go the Fuck to Sleep, read by Samuel L. Jackson, when it was released last week sold almost as many copies within 48 hours as Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. It goes like this:

The cats nestle close to their kittens,
The lambs have laid down with the sheep.
You're cosy and warm in your bed, my dear.
Please go the fuck to sleep.

And so on. There's a move to ban it in New Zealand. If you're not a member of Family First and find swearing funny you may also like Cursebird, 'a real-time feed of swearing on Twitter'.

books

Comments

  • 22 June 2011 at 9:26am
    alex says:
    Maybe the LRB could get some good classic titles onto the market: The Wings of the Fucking Dove, A Tale of Two Fucking Cities, &c.
    • 23 June 2011 at 2:14pm
      bdbd says: @ alex
      or Finnegan's Fucking Awake
    • 24 June 2011 at 1:15pm
      outofdate says: @ bdbd
      The memoirs of Christoper Hitchens, we are told, contain some side-splitting examples of the genre.
  • 22 June 2011 at 12:59pm
    cigar says:
    If they want to do it, they better do it quick, or PE will take away their opportunity. Once

    http://private-eye.co.uk/eyeplayer.php?media=20&

    and again

    http://private-eye.co.uk/eyeplayer.php?media=37&

    Enjoy!