Written by Jacques Franco, Staff Writer.

Chicago, IL–Christine Bowditch is an addict. A former honor student, phi beta kappa graduate of Occidental College, Bowditch has finally and definitively admitted that she no longer can control her her habit: buying paperback novels. “In college, it was for my classes, and then I’d see Bukowski or Joyce on the campus bookstore shelf–something that one of the other professors was teaching–and I just had to have it.” Bowditch admits that, although she owns several hundred novels by classic authors, she has only read a fraction of these books despite adding sometimes as many as two new books to her collection a day. “I know I’ll probably never read some of them, but I can’t help it; I like the look and feeling of being surrounded by books.” Bowditch noted that, while she at first had the ritzy idealism of owning a significant collection of first editions, her addiction had gotten so bad that she resorted to slumming in the bad parts of town to see if she could pick up a gem at one of the many thrift stores. “My parents will no longer associate with me,” Bowditch claimed, stating that they kicked her out after she tried to stash  a raggedy box of old paperbacks in the garage–some of which were missing pages and without their covers. An English major in college, Bowditch had been working as an editorial assistant in downtown Chicago before she reportedly filed bankruptcy, and moved into a halfway house, after a lavish spending spree at a local Chicago bookstore. “I walked in, and I had to own ’em all,” said Bowditch, without remorse. Kyle Graves, Bowditch’s former boyfriend, who was horrified to find her extensive collection of novels in a hidden room behind the kitchen, promptly broke up with her, and characterized Bowditch’s book-buying tendencies as “reckless, that of a hoarder, indiscriminate–for Christ’s sake, she had a whole shelf of smut novels she said she bought just to take up room. I’m no literary type. But it seems like there should be a point where you draw a line.”

-JF.

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Jacques Franco is a pretentious French filmmaker and self-proclaimed “poet,” though neither his filmmaking nor his poetry are particularly good.