Tuesday, September 22, 2009

6 Philosophers, Misinterpreted

Arthur Schopenhauer - "Smoke em if you got em"

Martin Heidegger - "In it to win it!"

Gilles Deleuze - "It's Britney, bitch!"

Baruch Spinoza - "Everybody's working for the weekend"

Immanuel Kant - "If there's grass on the field, play ball"

Søren Kierkegaard - "Who farted?!"

Writers Who Sound Like Pets

Edwidge Danticat

Friday, September 18, 2009

If I Could Travel Anywhere In Time

If I could travel anywhere in time, I would travel to the moment when John Grisham came up with the idea for The Pelican Brief.

I would just love to be there to witness that incredible fucking flash of lightning slash like a knife through the fabric of the universe.

Nothing was ever the same after that moment.

Every history has its turning points, its split seconds in which unforeseeable, irreversible revolutions take place. And that was one of ours.

Can you imagine the thrill you would feel if you could be a time-traveling fly on the wall in John Grisham’s study that day? I can imagine myself crouched there, in the corner, breathing as quietly as possible, maybe listening to a song on my iPod just to kind of add to the excitement but not turned up so high that John Grisham could hear it at all, because if I made a single sound or if some slight of motion of my body were to alter the reality of that moment in the least, and somehow interfere with the glorious perfection of the birth of that great work of art, I would basically want to reach up inside my vagina so far that I could punch the inside of my own face and even that would not be anywhere near enough punishment for such a crime.

My god. Imagine the way his face must have looked as he sat there, blinking into the abyss of time itself, on the brink, searching, searching and not knowing what he would find, and then by whatever mysteries there are that control the creative process, a god of sorts leaned down from the heavens and whispered into his ear, the pelican brief. And Grisham listened. And a few small tiny lines in his forehead danced a little, and smoothed themselves out, and he leaned forward and lifted up his Bic pen and began to write. He fills sheets and sheets of yellow legal paper with the early, rough sketches of what will become the century’s greatest masterwork. Oh, to witness such glory!

Yes, if some kind of angel came to me with a time machine and I could visit any moment, it would be that one. That or medieval times. I’m not sure.