[matchup #50 in Tournament of Bookshit]

I don’t have specific thoughts regarding either of these things. I imagine that working at Best Buy is similar to many retail jobs? You deal with a lot of odd customers, coworkers, and supervisors? Maybe that is an unfair assumption. See, the only retail job I worked was at a used book store in Virginia when I was in graduate school. I stocked the shelves and I also purchased inventory according to a massive buying manual that the owners had seemingly haphazardly created full of random rules regarding what sorts of books we should take in and what we should not. We bought a lot of mass market paper backs and children’s books. My following these rules at the buying table often meant that I turned down a lot of great books, fascinating and interesting books, that the owners had deemed a waste of shelving space. Probably, from a business standpoint, they were right: they knew their customers, and theirs were customers who were not interested in Fowles’ The Maggot, nor were their customers interested in Barnes’ Nightwood. Both of these books intrigued me when I held them in my hands at the buying table, and even as I turned them down, I wanted to know what was between their covers (I later read Nightwood in a class; still haven’t read The Maggot). Another terribly weird part of this job is that we threw out a lot of books. Like, shitloads of books. And the owners required us to rip the covers off these books because a few years before I worked there, a customer had pulled books out of the dumpster that they had trashed and resold those books to the store several times. So there I was, tearing covers off books like O’Brien’s The Things They Carried and Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, simply because these books had ‘been on the shelf too long.’ After that, I began to take the discards and put them nicely in a box and hide the box in the store until my assigned closing night, and then I would take the box to my car. At one point I had five boxes of books in my car, books the owners had deemed a ‘waste of shelf space,’ and these I distributed to my friends in order to make room to save more books. Eventually, the store closed because the owners couldn’t pay the rent, and I spent my final weekend at that job boxing up books to save from the dumpster in between breaking down shelves and stacking the book carts in a moving van.

- Ryan Call

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WINNER: calling yourself the editor-in-chief of an online journal.

He wrote an entire (and earnest) essay about Yates’ oeuvre four years before RY was published.[10]  Is it really okay to begrudge Lin the right to name his novel after an under-appreciated literary figure that clearly has meant something to him?  Or maybe it’s just a more admirable enterprise to protect a now-canonical realist author from Lin’s digital-fame grubbing?  The subtext to every sub-positive response to Lin’s work and accompanying personal brand seems to be twofold: (1) “I could write that.  I know how to not pile on subordinate clauses too” and (2) “I could become as famous as him if strangers bought shares in my future novels, enabling me to sit, consume kale, and coin acronyms on Twitter.”[11]  Fortunately, Lin’s fiction can exist apart from such criticisms because the Lin-ean frame—the megabytes of service he has performed deconstructing ‘Tao Lin,’[12] his style, and his infamy-inducing act[13]—acts as a helpful buffer, [emphasis mine -RC] letting Haley and Dakota wander safely in a traditional realist space without a self-consciously perspiratory narrator forcing them to confront the faults of their maker.

Have a read if you’re so inclined, and I hope all of you are having a lovely day. Take a break from the computer if you can and go for a walk sometime? It’s 60 degrees or so and sunny in Houston and I’m going to take my last class outside, I think.

- Ryan Call

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WINNER: hating on Jonathan Safran Foer

In fact, Tiger-M@te is hoping to set a world record with his latest masterpiece. The above literary magazines were part of a 700,000 website attack, which Tiger-M@te estimates is a ‘world record.’ He spoke exclusively with The Hacker News:

I hack 700,000 websites in one shot, this may be a new world Record. After submitting 200,000 domains,zone-h was going down again and again and became almost unresponsive in the end.so i was unable to submit all websites.so i’ve listed all domains in attachment. It was not just a server hack, actually whole data center got hacked.

Earlier this year, The Hacker News published an interview with Tiger-M@te, in which he claimed to write all of the code himself, as he only likes working alone. To his fans, he gave the following advice:

All i can say to my fans,”try to write your own code, rather than using someone else’s code and exploits.This will help you to gain whatever you want and before doing things, know every stuffs and how those things work.Hacking is all about Knowledge and skills.”

No word yet as to Tiger-M@te’s plans regarding whether or not he’ll pursue an MF@, though one gets the sense that Brown would love to have him.

It is a dream I have not had in so long. It is the kind of dream that I’ve missed having, one that I had so many times before when I was a young boy. Most of you have probably had this dream as well: the flying dream. Yes, when I was little, I often dreamed that I could fly. In my dream, I floated out of my room, down the stairs to the landing at the front door of our house, and outside.

Back then, my father was a pilot nearing height of his trajectory; he had had a great career in the Air Force and was gaining seniority at USairways (then USAIR). And, before my freshmen year in college, he had risen well, earning a regular transatlantic route on the 767s and 757s in the right seat, and then he had been promoted to captain on a 737 on the Eastern Seaboard. 9/11 changed all of that.

***

When I think of very very short stories, I cannot help but think immediately of “Cape” by Kim Chinquee. In fact, it is one of the few very short short stories that I can recall to mind; granted, I don’t read a lot of very very short short stories, so I’m not exactly on expert on the genre.

“Cape” consists of seven sentences. “Cape” consists of fifty-six words, not counting the title. In NOON, where it was first published, the body of “Cape” takes up five lines of text. “Cape” begins with this sentence:

I want to return to a time when I feel as though I can celebrate the institute of flying. I want to tear out this Kim Chinquee story, fold it into a tiny airplane, and fly it on its way to my father. I want to remind him of how he fell in love with flying all those years ago.

“Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” is one of those stories that, for me, connects to The Age of Wire and String in a meaningful way. As I’ve mentioned before in some of these other posts, I had previously thought of stories as ABC tales of one character or another’s plights, such as “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” “To Build a Fire,” “The Most Dangerous Game,” etc., this next stage in my reading began to tune me into how words might be used for other purposes: world-building, for example.

This story reminds me of all of the time I spent as a child sketching maps of islands and other countries that I had made up. I drew in mountain ranges, detailed rivers, lakes, and other bodies of water. I created forms of government, basic economies, foreign policies, and so on. I drew pictures of the flora and fauna that inhabited these lands. These activities weren’t so much about telling a narrative story directly, but instead they seemed to be about creating and organizing a separate world in which an infinite number of stories were possible.

In some cases, it is a relief simply to create the world, rather than to write the story, for what I’m agonizing over now is that every sentence I write might kill off other possibilities within the story.

And although the book begins with a sort of prologue, or ‘argument,’ which describes the book as a ‘life project’ meant to catalogue the age of wire and string, I will always think of the opening sentence of “Intercourse with Resuscitated Wife” as the warning shot, a language bunch that reoriented my understanding of how a parcel of words might be arranged in unusual ways.

The dropped articles, the potential comma splice, the archaic tone, the oddity described by the text, all of these I might have seen before, but never in such a sustained and tightly controlled way as this, and not in a contemporary landscape. And furthermore, I hadn’t yet become aware of many of the precursors who made such a collection possible. So to read this first sentence was a bit shocking for me, but in a good way, and helped me take greater care in my reading and writing from then on.