Robert Coover

uh very you know clever idea that like it's like oh yeah that's yeah that's funny yeah it's a new yorker article oh do a movie out of it and it's like okay

yeah well now we've done this we need to do the robert coover book where it's cat in the hat which runs for president or whatever you remember that you ever heard

of

that you know robert coover wrote that the public burning he wrote that book where it was like some uh either republican or democratic national convention going on and then the cat in the hat himself shows up by bill and said no and says i'm running for president and like just all the chaos that that causes basically that's like a whole book you know you didn't know about that yeah i think it i don't remember what it's called it might literally be like the cat in the hat runs for president or something is it But anyway, yeah.

It's like a novel? Yeah.

I think he just died, like, yeah, two years ago.

Yeah.

They did, uh, instead of Pynchon they did Robert Coover-

Yeah

...

Interesting.

Some of those you should've gotten.

The Coover one, obviously.

So that'd actually-

It forks off into three potential paths forward.

Something that's a little more extreme and aggressive in its forking nature is in Robert Coover's short story collection, Prick Songs and Descants, an absolutely phenomenal and seminal short story collection.

There's a story called The Babysitter.

It's probably the most famous story in this book.

And he's just going to make you do that.

Another of my 10 Titans, Robert Coover, gives us whatever happened to Gloomy Gus of the Chicago Bears? and how Coover describes it.

So Coover, before this, had written a book called The Public Burning, and The Public Burning very prominently featured Richard Nixon, and he had done vast amounts of research about Richard Nixon to right the public burning.

And as he said, as I was researching Nixon, I realized that Nixon was really great at everything he ever tried to do except two things.