I’ve seen some great puzzles on the Web and I’ve enjoyed being destroyed by them. Here’s a puzzle for you… if you’re clever and want to figure it out. Remember: everything’s a clue and there’s no such thing as a mistake.

So, there’s a solution.  You must figure out what it is.  It is something shared by two towering artistic achievements of the Twentieth Century.  It connects the written page to the cinema.  The clues that follow will give some players the evidence they need to search far and wide, connecting themselves to ideas that they never suspected the existence of.  For a few players, the clues will work unconsciously to give them a solution without really trying.  Some of your solutions will be better than the actual solution.  We all work differently.  Obsession is for most of us the best answer.  Moreover, one’s lunatic obsessing consumes hours.  So that’s it.  Take a break from work.  Obsess until you get it.  The first person to post the answer in a comment and clearly declare it to be their answer wins.

I will withhold some clues and drop them in when I think they are needed.  Just use the comments to leave your thoughts, guesses, suspicions, speculations, and theories.  I’ll leave the puzzle going until I decide enough is enough, even if someone gets it early.  It’s perfectly fair to let other people play for a while.  If nobody plays at all I’ll just put it off to the side somewhere and move on.

I have whittled the clues down to a smaller group that should work pretty well.

Here are the clues:

His comic books appeared in a series called American Splendor.

Strangely enough, it happens to be June 16th which is worldwide Bloomsday, when Ulysses is celebrated with public readings.

Via Dangerous Minds

The main problem for me that this service solves is my inability to remember to keep reading long-form works on a cell phone.  I just can’t remember to keep going, no matter what the book.  It’s something to do with the small screen and my feeling that all handheld units are for very temporary work and pleasure.  When I read long works I use a book or a Kindle e-reader.  I have no problems with continuity there.  But CellStories only offers short fiction.  It’s the perfect little pocket literature gizmo.  I actually feel a tiny sense of accomplishment when I finish a short story on my Droid phone.  I feel that I have filled some time well that might otherwise have been spent checking my hair.

So if you want some grown-up short fiction, try CellStories.

What might Ernest have meant by that? Did he mean that a writer should be writing what he/she knows?  Writing from reality?  David Shields seems to think so.  He puts this quote in the chapter called ‘Reality.’  But I don’t know.  I think the inclusion of this quote is a weak pin in the framework of Reality Hunger.  I don’t think Hemingway had any concern whatsoever with reality.  I don’t think Hemingway’s ‘shit’ equals ‘fiction’ or ‘made-up.’  I think Hemingway’s ‘shit’ equals shit.  My shit-detector is going off and it’s pointing in Mr. Shields’ direction.

His book pinpoints the weakness of fictional form in today’s reality-obsessed culture.  The more real we get in our art, the more real our art will be.  We see it all around us, this fixation on reality shows and data and news and of-the-moment information.  We want people to write memoirs more than we want them to write fantasies with fictional characters running around dragging us through the usual plot structures of the worn-out novel form.

I’d believe David Shields if he’d tell more lies.  His book is a big collection of quotations from writers, artists, philosophers, academics, photographers, and filmmakers through history.  The quotations lead us ever closer to the general idea that the observation and reporting of reality in and of itself creates all the fiction we really need.  The pulling together of various shards and bits of reality and observation build art and culture.  To hold a memoir writer hostage to absolute truth is futile and ridiculous because the writer’s job is simply to write.

But I think I’d prefer the book if, having read it to the end and found the appendix with all the sources of the book’s quotations listed, I then could go on to discover that every single one of the quotations was in fact… fake.

The book should have been an absolutely made-up total fake because that would be really real.

Mark Twain, who wrote what I think might be the single greatest book ever written by an American – The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – appears in a Thomas Edison film from 1909. He appears to be a natural-born performer who enjoys playing for the camera during his off-time.

Don’t be afraid of stealing.  Just do it.

David Shields is a thief and he’s the happiest most energetic thief you’ll ever meet between to covers.  All art is theft.  We build all our original creations on top of other creations.  We consume and then we spit the pieces back out in exploding new arrangements.  We appropriate all the time when we incorporate bits of newsprint into paintings, or street sounds into symphonies, or quotes into novels.

Novels.  What are they and what do they really do?  Do we need or want novels anymore?  Fiction?  Or do we want the more real?  Are we craving more and more reality?  It’s on TV everywhere.  Can the old form of the novel that describes scenes so well and gets into the characters’ heads really compete with all the new forms coming to life that are built primarily upon reality?

What is reality?  Whose reality?  Isn’t one’s perception of a simple street scene actually fiction once it passes through the subjective filter?  Isn’t everything ultimately fiction?

Shields’s book is composed of many fragments mostly snatched from other people throughout history.  Shields leaves his own remarks unannounced until the back of the book where he finally credits his sources.  The point is to connect thoughts from all over the world through many ages to gradually build up a central argument or ‘manifesto’ for a modern art or literature that eliminates the guilt from borrowing or ‘stealing.’  The ideas are obviously not all new, otherwise there would be no fragments to put in the book.  But the expression of the ideas in this way is new.  Reality Hunger is a jolt and it will offend as many or more people than it inspires.

Several years ago Bob Dylan got into hot water for using a phrase from a relatively unknown novel.  Sure enough, Dylan’s phrase did match the novelist’s.  Outrage ensued.  When the novelist was asked about his feelings he stated that if Bob Dylan wanted to use one of his phrases he was simply honored.

This book is very timely in a world where people are getting into lawsuits because some artist’s sculpture appears in a street photo.  We’ve been waiting for this book.  Fortunately, Mr. Shields is as excited about this book as his readers are – those who aren’t outraged anyway.  He comes off as a very energetic and enthusiastic partner to the artist.  I admire this book a great deal and will most likely be referring to bits and pieces of it for many years – and stealing them.

The British Film Institute has released the first filmed version of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland.  This British film was made in 1903 by Cecil Hepworth and Percy Stow.

Try the contest at LitKicks.com.

Someone named Brian Duffy at Massachusetts College of Art and Design made this peculiar animation featuring the voice of William S. Burroughs. He gets that face animation of Burroughs just absolutely perfect. And that copy of Naked Lunch is the exact copy I’m reading this very evening. Who is this animator?  He’s very good.

You know, this is what’s so great about reading today, so far and beyond what any other time has allowed people to enjoy.  It’s that you can read something like Naked Lunch and think ‘Whew!  What a weird creature that Burroughs must have been!  What a lunatic!  Very sharp and very crazy.’  And then you can go out across the Web and find all sorts of fantastic films that have him walking around in them.  You can find some kid up in Massachusetts who reads this lunatic and gets so inspired that he makes an incredible film about some one little thing Burroughs said at some point in his long life.  Amazing.  It’s never been better to read than now.

Henry Miller hated America. So he moved to Paris and then, eventually, moved back to the U.S. In this 1969 television interview, he says he thinks the end is near for America. He was right. Bush ended it in 2000. We just don’t realize it yet. We’ve elected an insurance salesman to the presidency and we think he’s going to change the world. He won’t. The experiment in democracy came to a horrifying grinding failure with the criminal organization of Bush. And some tepid fake hipster bloggers aren’t going to do a damn thing about it either. We need more creeps like Henry Miller who hate America. You can’t fix it if you love it. You’ve got to hate it.

Halloween is coming.  What better way to prepare than by reading some Poe?

Via Boing Boing

Here’s a quote from her article:

Lord exposed how much destruction was necessary—at least for Giacometti—to the process of creation. He also captured the complexity of the relationship between artist and subject.

I’ve never been able to get through a book by Thomas Pynchon. Well, I should reveal that I’ve only tried once with his Against the Day.  Unreadable as far as I’m concerned.  But I still went out and bought a copy of Gravity’s Rainbow.  James Joyce is unreadable too and yet I still like him.  I never hold unreadability against a writer because I know how truly stupid I can be while reading – sometimes falling asleep and having to reread many pages.  But this video is probably the best book trailer I have ever seen.  I’d been thinking that the book sounded like a bore, but this trailer has me digging into the side pouch of my briefcase to find some spare change for the bookstore.

Another thing – whoever did the voiceover for this little movie is a stark raving mad genius.  He should read the entire book out loud.  I’d buy that too.

Improving upon the most boring character in the history of world literature, Electronic Arts is going to release an action game called Dante’s Inferno.  From the looks of the preview, this version of the Dante character is much more interesting and capable than the literary original who is the main character in the Divine Comedy trilogy consisting of the epic poems called Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso.  Author Dante Alighieri wrote himself into his epic poem as a rather stolid, questioning dullard who follows the ghost of Virgil around in hell.  He whines about all the people who did him wrong in life and coincidentally runs into almost all of them during his sour-grapes tour of Satan’s domain.  But this video version of Dante kicks some smokin’ butt.  This is the Dante I’ve been waiting for and I am going to relish using my Xbox controller to stomp around and cut the heads off some nasty devils and repentant sinners.

It’s probably best to at least read Inferno before playing so that you can agree with me on how to improve the irritating main character.  But I will credit Mr. Dante Alighieri with one major achievement: he seems to have invented multi-level game play.  His version of hell is a series of rings that descend toward the most terrible of sins and punishments.  That’s pretty much the definition of modern computer gaming.

Here’s a chart of Dante’s hell by Barry Moser: