THEY CALL ME MAD DOG!: A Story for Bitter, Lonely People [Paperback]

Erika Lopez (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 18, 2001

What do you do when love goes wrong? If you're Tomato Rodriguez, the reigning queen of motorcycle-riding, bicoastal bisexuals, you do every wrong thing there is to do. But what starts out as a small-scale revenge job complete with whipped cream, Bic ballpoints, and a monster truck, soon turns into a murder charge and a visit to the slammer with all the rest of the bad, bad girls. Traumatised by tough B movie one-liners and tedious lesbian orgies, Tomato decides to transform herself into Mad Dog, hoping that Ilsa the Wicked Warden will think her too crazy to be convicted on a murder rap.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Ricardo Ortiz Advocate Lopez gives great text....Her narrative voice is one of the sharpest you'll find among the hybrid arts at our cultural borderlands. -- Review

About the Author

Erika Lopez is a cartoonist and author who has twice won a Pew Fellowship in Literary Fiction. The author of the novel Flaming Iguanas (currently available from Turnaround) and a collection of cartoons, Lap Dancing for Mommy, she lives in San Francisco.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster (April 18, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0684849429
• ISBN-13: 978-0684849423
• Product Dimensions: 7.2 x 7.1 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #740,889 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Erika Lopez is back, and ready to take back her place at the head of the rickety kids' table... in September 2010, she's publishing "THE GIRL MUST DIE" with a matching book of "THE GIRL MUST DIE POSTCARDS" through their new publishing company, Monster Girl Media!

To follow updates, go to her Cartoon Log, http://clog.ErikaLopez.com

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(Biography from www.ErikaLopez.com ...)

After poor--but happy--frolicking years of art school in Philadelphia at The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (and stints at Moore College of Art and The University of the Arts), Erika was surprised to find herself out on the streets with a lot of attitude and an inability to hold down a job. So after a couple of crappy jobs, bad room mates, and a couple of days in jail, Erika was losing the dream of being a rich and famous artist strung out on heroin supplied by NYC gallery dealers.

Erika quickly adjusted her ambitions and aimed to become a famous cartoonist for porn magazines. That didn't go so well either. But her cartoons kept getting published in San Francisco and so she moved there and ended up living with a Gothic meth lap dancer and a bleach-blonde Eskimo call girl from Canada.

Soon after getting her own apartment with no job in sight, Lopez got a couple of grants she'd--half-jokingly, but desperately-- applied for during one of her previous "fired" periods back in Philadelphia: She was a Pew discipline winner a couple of times, but the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts each gave her $2500 to write. Write? Write what?

So following through on her own dare and having nothing left to lose, she learned to ride a crappy motorcycle in a week, and rode cross country so she could at least write about doing something. When she made it safely home, she penned her way through her first novel, "Flaming Iguanas," sprinkling it with enough illustrations to distract the reader from the writing.

It worked. It sold. Her editor at Simon & Schuster offered her more money to write again and again, and so she wrote and wrote until she realized she was getting weird and creepy after so much time alone. The future seemed so bright for young Erika, she thought she'd have a Victorian house in San Francisco within an hour. But with a shrinking economy and "creative differences" with her publisher, the jig was up. She unwisely shot herself in the foot at the beginning of what was to become a massive economic downturn. In no time at all it seemed she was going down in flames...

Again, Erika simply went with the flow. She embraced this challenge with a pinch on the cheek and a pat on the head, by gaining weight, wearing muumuus, listening to AM talk radio too loud, and calling herself "Grandma Lopez." She was going around calling people "toots", pinching their cheeks too hard, and giving everyone unsolicited advice as she limped on over to the welfare line.

Becoming a burden to the state and calling the welfare checks her "special mini art grants," she turned those salmon-colored notes into "Nothing Left but the Smell: A Republican on Welfare." As far as anyone knows, it's the first known Food Stamp Variety Show with lots of theatrical complaining, some papery cartoon moments, and tender, bitter singing. It's a show about being a sorely-mistaken, middle class pipsqueak ... one of those totally unsympathetic characters who grows up thinking all the civil and voting fights have already been fought so now she's free to sit back and buy lots of crap from mail order catalogues. Instead, she ends up in the welfare line so she can star in her own variety show about it later.

This started a new chapter in Erika's adventure, one that embraces a multi-media approach to life. No one focus, but a broad view on that "what's next" question buried inside each and every one of us. This new and improved Erika has been travelling around the world, Oslo, Edinburg, London and Manchester, performing and inspiring other pipsqueaks all over the planet.

She has now set her sights on making movies with Monster Girl Movies, based on books published by their new publishing company, Monster Girl Media.

Watch out for "The Girl Must Die," to be published in September 2010, available with a matching set of art postcards, in the U.S., Canada, and online.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

67 of 73 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A linguist's charming look at recent political controversies, May 29, 2000

By 

Robert E. Helmerichs (Minneapolis, MN USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Language War (Hardcover)

Lakoff, a Berkeley linguist, examines several recent controversies from a linguistic point of view. She has chapters on speech codes, Anita Hill, Hillary Rodham Clinton, O. J. Simpson, Ebonics, and Monicagate, but she doesn't discuss the events themselves (although her viewpoint is usually quite clear); rather, she concentrates on the national discourse on the events. Her overarching thesis is that each of these controversies is part of a language war, in which previously downtrodden groups (especially blacks and women) are trying to seize the right to define themselves away from the traditional holders of power over language (i.e., white middle-class men).

She speaks from a post-modern point of view, but much more rationally than I normally associate with the po-mo crowd. Through this book, I have developed much more sympathy for some of the underlying tenets of post-modern thought, if not for the more extreme examples that have turned post-modernism into self-parody (e.g., believing an article claiming that gravity is a social construct). Although Lakoff is somewhat out there at times, she's not too far out, and not all that often; and even when I don't agree with her, I still find myself understanding better the different sides of these very divisive issues, which in itself is a noble goal. And the book is a pure delight to read; Lakoff's style is breezy and pleasant, and she usually remembers to define linguistics jargon for her general audience. She is, however, a self-confessed unrepentant liberal, and more conservative readers may find her point-of-view somewhat hard to take.

My only quibble is that her publisher has fallen prey to the evil of endnotes; they are especially criminal in this case, where the notes are few in number but highly useful. They should have been placed at the bottom of the page, where they belong.

21 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Disputed Power of Language, December 26, 2001

By 

Stephen Graham (Seattle, WA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Language War (Paperback)

Some events you experience directly. Most events you learn about, usually by listening to someone or by reading an account. Because of this, who tells you the story and how that person tells it is important. If you interrupt a fight between two children, you usually expect them to tell different stories about who started the fight and why. In the terms Robin Lakoff uses, multiple narrators frame the story in different ways.

Lakoff's central thesis is that many of our most recent political and social conflicts involve the use and ownership of language and discourse, often as the central point of the "war." This is immediately obvious in the chapters concerned with the history and usage of "politically correct" and speech codes and on the role of Ebonics in education. As Lakoff herself admits, her thesis is more controversial when she discusses the other topics in the book: Clarence Thomas & Anita Hill; public perception of Hillary Rodham Clinton; the O.J. Simpson Trial; and the Clinton-Lewinsky-Starr imbroglio.

Lakoff embraces a post-modernist view of language and its use: the speaker's use of language can shape perceptual reality. Words have power and who defines a word is important. As Lakoff argues, many of the assumptions underlying Standard American English derive from the views and experience of a particular constellation of economic, social and ethnic groups, primarily white and led by men. As various minority groups have become more influential or have greater access to center-stage, standing assumptions are challenged. And when the status quo changes, those who liked it react strongly.

Lakoff also reminds us that who gets to talk and ask questions and what are allowable questions and answers is an important practical concern in linguistics. Thus, when considering Hill and Thomas, she is less immediately concerned with the facts than with what questions were asked of whom and how the media and the Senate Judiciary Committee depicted those involved. The depiction of Anita Hill depended in part on a set of definitions of who women are and how they may behave, i.e., on a common understanding of English and its meaning, whether or not this matched reality.

Lakoff writes in a very clear and pleasant style. While she uses linguistic terms throughout the work, she does so in a way that does not overwhelm the non-specialist reader, but also assumes a level of intelligence and ability to learn. Her chapters form coherent wholes, incorporating sufficient background to supplement what knowledge we already have of each incident. Most readers should find something of value in Lakoff's work, even if they don't find it as compelling an argument as others.

The Language War is particularly apropos for those who read or write reviews on Amazon. Lakoff briefly discusses the reviews of It Takes a Village and the techniques used by those who didn't care for Rodham Clinton, regardless of the merit of the book.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A revenge fantasy for the masses!, March 4, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: They Call Me Mad Dog: A Novel for Bitter, Lonely People (Mad Dog Rodriguez Trilogy) (Hardcover)

Erika Lopez is a true Equal Opportunity Offender, in the ranks of Howard Stern and the Farrelly brothers (There's Something About Mary). Her humor is shriekingly, gross-out funny. I found myself screaming "EW! NO WAY!" out loud (and by myself) as I read Mad Dog. Aside from the incredible sound-bite imagery, the storyline makes you eat this whole book in one sitting. Mad Dog is a more fully realized narrative than Flaming Iguanas, showing Lopez' growth and confidence as a writer. Her artwork, as always, is gorgeous, this time geared more towards line drawings than stamp art, drawings of bodacious, Chiquita fruit bearing, thigh-weilding, pastie-wearing babes! A jilted Tomato aka Mad Dog Rodriguez is the antiheroine for anyone of any sexual proclivity who's ever indulged a revenge fantasy.