- Ryan Call

- – -

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.

“Cold France” consists of seventeen short sections, each of which describes a different “permutation” of France. There is “Dog France,” “Whale France,” “Tent France,” “Sponge France,” and “Fat France.” I read that in “Merry France” one Frenchman “simply said ‘fox’ until all of Limoges had died from heart seizures” from laughing so hard. In “Dark France” a man questions his existence: “What is the meaning of darkness? thinks Jean. He wants to move to another country, but he cannot see what ticket to buy at the station. A badger walks into him in the woods when he is on vacation.” In “Slow France” I read “Because each follicle has so long to think over each new molecule of French hair, each French strand is shinier, stronger, and more fit to entertain at parties than other, foreign hairs. So when you get it in the mail, please remember: Whatever you do, don’t cut your French hair.”

At the time I read this story, I was taken (and still am) with how funny it was; I hadn’t seen a story like this, so I didn’t quite know how to react, aside from thinking it was funny and exciting and new to me, nor could I really understand why I reacted the way I did. But now, after having read Invisible Cities, and after having learned how one kink in a sentence’s span can lead to a new sentence, I think I have a better sense for this story. So much of what makes it funny is how Marschall’s opening riff on one kind of France leads from one kink to another in each sentence, creating humor from both his setting up odd juxtapositions and his twisting a comic thread until it almost breaks.

For example, take these few sentences from “Mind France,” a section about how France only exists in our minds:

I love how the Pope’s love for all people leads to how people concentrate on imagining France, which leads to discussions, the Internet, and the great phrase about dot france sites. It’s a nice, simple evolution within the story, and I like the effect it creates. Many of the sections of the story work in this way, and it’s enjoyable to read.

I like this story because it reminds me of a time in my life when I first became excited about writing and reading, and I began to seek out other kinds of stories and books.

At some point in my reading and writing that fall I discovered the click in literature, too. It was real lucky that just when I stopped being able to get the click from math logic I started to be able to get it from fiction. The first fictional clicks I encountered were in Donald Barthelme’s “The Balloon” and in parts of the first story I ever wrote, which has been in my trunk since I finished it. I don’t know whether I have that much natural talent going for me fiction wise, but I know I can hear the click, when there is a click.

Of course, I had to go find a copy of “The Balloon.” I had never read and Barthelme, had only vaguely heard of him and for some reason thought he was an author writing in the 1800s.

So I found a copy of “The Balloon” and began reading quickly; I really wanted to find out what ‘the click’ was all about. In my haste, I committed what I’ve long thought of as one of my most egregious misreadings of a story.

Here’s what my hurrying brain read the first time around:

Of course, the real version goes like this:

As I read on, I was so excited by what I was reading–a story recommended by David Foster Wallace–that I missed several other subtle references to the narrator’s control over the balloon. You can imagine my surprise at the final paragraph. I remember thinking to myself, “That’s it?”

I am a reader who must constantly remind himself to slow down, or else I’ll miss ‘the click.’