I Write Like David Foster Wallace

Apparently, I write like somebody named David Foster Wallace. I know… it’s weird. Who would have thought? Who is David Foster Wallace? I think he’s kind of high literary serious-minded and wild sort of college professor type stuff. I should just do a Wikipedia on him, but I don’t really want to know who this person is that I supposedly write like. Below, you can see my official badge that proves the Wallace connection:

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

I got my writing-like-David-Foster-Wallace badge from I Write Like. It could not have been easier. I simply pasted several of my very opinionated and slightly acidic blog posts into the I Write Like form and then pressed the button. Each time, this David Foster Wallace guy popped up. One blog post that I dribbled out because I had nothing of interest to say on that day came up as Dan Brown. No surprise there because Dan Brown is so numbingly uninteresting that his brain should be transplanted into the body of Tom Hanks where it would dwell very contentedly for some time I would suppose.

I Write Like is really loads of fun. I could paste entries into it all day long and feel that I had spent my time well. That’s what I’m doing today. For the entire rest of the day I’m going to sit here dropping my blog posts into this machine to find out if maybe I really am David Foster Wallace.  I may even start to make stuff up just for this writing machine and eventually maybe I’ll see my own name pop up: I write like…

Film: Outer Space

Marc Campbell posted this 1999 film called Outer Space by Australian avant-garde filmmaker Peter Tscherassky. Using found footage from something featuring actress Barbara Hershey, Tscherassky creates a jumping and jittering psychotic version of a haunted house movie. The simplest of shots showing a woman entering a house, sitting down, looking into a mirror, looking out a window, are turned into extravagant, multi-layered cubist visions from a nightmare.

Picture Book by Terry Bisson and Rudy Rucker

Billy’s Picture Book by Terry Bisson, a collection of jarringly twisted short stories for adult children, has a set of illustrations by Rudy Rucker.  The stories follow one precocious Billy through the harrowing and sickening ordeal of being a kid.  If your kid has a mind that is easily warped or disturbed or if your kid is just plain crazy, don’t read these stories to them!  But if your kid has a casual interest in murder and mayhem, well this might be just the book for the little monster.

The book is available as a free e-book and as a paperback for purchase.

Comics Author Harvey Pekar Has Passed Away

American comics genius Harvey Pekar has passed away at the age of 70.  I think Pekar was the greatest writer of comics because he treated the form as literature – for real – not like most of the dimwits writing ‘graphic novels.’ Pekar was serious and nervous and funny and angry, with very little separation between. His observations of everyday life run a full range from fixing a flat tire in a snow storm to surviving cancer to trying to find a file folder at work.  He looked at his life and wrote it all down for his comic books.

His comic books appeared in a series called American Splendor.

Do Books Work as Memory Theater?

Open Letters Monthly has an article called In Defense of the Memory Theater, by Nathan Schneider in which he argues that books on shelves perform the function of reflecting memories back at us.  They are a constant reminder of the various events, stages, and emotional states of our lives.  We look at our shelves and can instantly catapult ourselves back in time to events surrounding our reading of various volumes.

Schneider mentions a 16th-century memory theater that used images and symbols of the cosmos to inspire observers and enhance their intellectual powers.  Books, for Schneider, do something similar when they are visible on our shelves.  I agree up to a point.  I am often taken back in time by my own books upon their shelves.  But so am I transported by nearly every object in my home.  Objects all have this power.  Books are not exceptional in this regard.

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