Lie, Memory, Michael Chabon's Own Private Holocaust, by Paul Maliszewski

When does an author have the responsibility to the let the reader know he or she is mixing fact and fiction, autobiography and mythology?

I might be a little late to this but...

Reductive Literary Equations

(The Hardy Boys)^1.618 = The Da Vinci Code
Bukowski - Byron = Last Exit to Brooklyn
Moby Dick - genius = Jaws

[from I Love Books via GalleyCat]

Googlebation part XXX

I'm not a Real Estate Agent in Minnesota.


Antoine Wilson

You know you're a phenom when...

Limited Edition Prep Belt by A Tierney

[enjoying the book very much, by the way...kudos to Curtis!!!]

Pessoa

From "A Factless Autobiography":

90

To recognize reality as a form of illusion and illusion as a form of reality is equally necessary and equally useless. The contemplative life, to exist at all, must see real-life accidents as the scattered premises of an unattainable conclusion, but it must also consider the contingencies of dreams as in some sense worthy of the attention we give them, since this attention is what makes us contemplatives.

Anything and everything, depending on how one sees it, is a marvel or a hindrance, an all or nothing, a path or a problem. To see something in constantly new ways is to renew and multiply it. That is why the contemplative person, without ever leaving his village, will nevertheless have the whole universe at his disposal. There's infinity in a cell or a desert. One can sleep cosmically against a rock.

But there are times in our meditation - and they come to all who meditate - when everything is suddenly worn-out, old, seen and reseen, even though we have yet to see it. Because no matter how much we meditate on something, and through meditation transform it, whatever we transform it into can only be the substance of meditation. At a certain point we are overwhelmed by a yearning for life, by a desire to know without the intellect, to meditate with only our senses, to think in a tactile or sensory mode, from inside the object of our thought, as if it were a sponge and we were water. And so we also have our night, and the profound weariness produced by emotions becomes even more profound, since in this case the emotions come from thought. But it's a night without slumber or moon or stars, a night as if all had been turned inside out - infinity internalized and ready to burst, and the day converted into the black lining of an unfamiliar suit.

Yes, it's always better to be the human slug that loves what it doesn't know, the leech that's unaware of how repugnant it is. To ignore so as to live! To feel in order to forget! Ah, and all the events lost in the green-white wake of age-old ships, like a cold spit off the tall rudder that served as a nose under the eyes of the ancient cabins!

Doomsday Device

Remixed car safety video: Operation Joyride

[via the very entertaining Coudal Partners]

We don't need no stinking CONTEXT

Bush: "Albert Camus said that freedom is a long-distance race." From Camus' The Fall, so it must be European, anti-terrorist, sophsticated...Uh, but, um...

Vladimir Nabokov said that you can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.

Samuel Clemens said that you wants to keep 'way fum de water as much as you kin, en don't run no resk, 'kase it's down in de bills dat you's gwyne get hung.

National Magazine Award Nominees

Well folks the American Society of Magazine Editors has spoken and the Finalists for the 2005 National Magazine Awards have been announced. The New Yorker is well represented, as usual, in many categories. Also, as usual, the ASME folks have passed up My Favorite Publications, Surfer and Found. But what's most exciting to me is that The Paris Review, under the wise leadership of Brigid Hughes, has received a nomination for excellence in magazine fiction writing, and they cite my story "Everyone Else" as one of the reasons. Morning wood.

Edimification

Oh.. that's right... I promised some edification. This one goes out to all ya'll Gawker-stalkers out there, Metafilter-addicts, and compulsive readers of Google news:

Every morning brings us the news of the globe, and yet we are poor in noteworthy stories. This is because no event any longer comes to us without already being shot through with explanation. In other words, by now almost nothing that happens benefits storytelling; almost everything benefits information. Actually, it is half the art of storytelling to keep a story free from explanation as one reproduces it.

{Walter Benjamin, "The Storyteller," dropping knowledge like Galileo dropped the orange.}

...

Okay, good, but what's the other half of the art of storytelling?

Boo!

From Charles Mcgrath's review of Ashbery's new book in the NYT:

Ashbery has written more than 20 books -- most of them of consistently high quality, with the exception of the tedious ''Flow Chart'' -- and he has been around so long, reinventing himself over and over again, that the experience of reading him now is a little like re-enacting the central drama of most Ashbery poems: the experience of suddenly coming upon something that is both deeply familiar and more than a little strange.

I thought FLOW CHART was the bomb. I didn't think it was tedious or of less than high quality. Actually, it blew my mind. What do you all, all two of you, think of FLOW CHART? Tedious or not?

It's Friday Fun Time

Rappin Jelly Donut: MAXIMUM WAGE

Scroll down to "Maximum Wage" video, watch it in Quicktime.


BONUS: "Hey dude!" Matt Shindell turned me on to this one:

SOCCER PRACTICE

Scroll down to "Soccer Practice" video, watch it in Real Media.

According to Eduardo, that's Matt's arm in the picture of Keith below:

It's been almost a month...

since the blogging community lost resident aphorist and occasional sillimanesque ejaculator Aaron McCollough. Here is his final post, with commentary.

Monday, February 07, 2005

Last Broadcast [Too Short also retired.]

And...like Tost...I'm out. [Of the toaster.] If you are interested in the question of my merits as a poet [There was a question?], please read my books. [What about your merits as a blogger?] Good or bad, the proof should be there more or less. [The PUDDING] Otherwise, godspeed you. [Don't you mean fuck off?]

I hope you'll check in with GutCult every winter and summer. [What's GutCult?]

Life [seriously?], wife [okay], and writing [what will you do with the other 23 hours of the day?] call and call me back to my notebooks[Ooohhh!]...away from the blip. [And professional sports?]

This was an interesting experiment. [It was all just an experiment?] I'm glad we did this. [Does this mean I have to go now, too? But my loyal reader(s)!]

Coming soon to WOT-WHAT: Edification!