I don’t know what’s worse: the racism in Black Boy, the paradoxical ingrown logic of Catch-22, or the unnamed impenetrable authority in The Trial. For a bro into dystopia, you ain’t seen a fucked up situation until our poor couple in Revolutionary Road shows us the bloody way. Looking at my browser’s recent history feels like my “resent history,” all the facebook albums of parties I never went, people in tighter-looser clothes and sexier-grainier lighting. And if low res camera phones are our muse, may she render the contemporary “indie” authors implicated to the right of the shelf — each spine thinner and thinner as the thinning of subject, or thinning of Roth’s hair; or, the opposite of Sartre’s thickening lenses — with red plastic cups optimistically half-full of beer, the ghost of guacamole or coke on a nose, and tattoos adorning signs so counter-culturally ingratiating, they should be affixed with “like” buttons below them. They are all a bit happier and I am, which isn’t saying much, my 9th hour in this office chair. Existentialism in Humanism seems redundant; what, you want an existential armadillo? Armor dude’s too busy being fucked to know he’s fucked. The enterprise of human sympathy began with words. Before that, we just ate one another. Let us not ignore the timely placed rectangular lake of a million bears reflecting the Columns of Influence, back when dour men capitalized things, instead of capitalizing on things. Madsen may have asked for matte, but the printers, perhaps consumed by his oily complexion, thought gloss might do the trick — and do not gloss over this tomb or tome or airy epitaph. The cover yields stereoscopic red and cyan, as if 3D glasses where needed to stumble into Apt. 3D, somewhere in New York City in which this writer resides, to finally grasp, then touch, the irl glossy flesh that is him. That Madsen is a walking Purell commercial is less of a commentary, than mere impulse.

Rating: Not