The Dark Balloon

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Exit strategy raising AttributeError and Other Nothense.

For those of you not in the know, you can join by following me on Twitter. For those of you in the know, I’ll let you puzzle out this amazing website.

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Ambiguity is the drop shadow of literature.

As the horse galloped through the forest with a rider on his back, he aimed for all the low branches. Thus, he participated in a rudimentary form of evolution in which trees eventually stopped growing low branches and decided the whole “forest” idea wasn’t such a good one if wild animals were going to be running through them the entire time.

People who think Equus is an easy play to understand don’t understand that (a) the main character Dysart doesn’t say anything substantial for most of the play; (b) the important things we learn about Dysart are by proxy through Alan whom I call the Beacon of Crazy Ambiguity; (c) a lot of meaning is conveyed (and I use that word loosely) through avant-garde stage directions and unreliable dream sequences slash flashbacks that don’t go anywhere and don’t mean anything; (d) the play at once interweaves a depressed man going through mid-life crisis and a equine-Freudian sexual exploration; and (e) Peter Schaffer is guano insane.

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James Joyce is the kid who wears sunglasses indoors.

It’s ridiculous that I have to annotate this for you, but here goes since seemingly nobody else has noticed this (not even Wikipedia!): The book Here Comes Everybody takes its title from the main character in Finnegan’s Wake. That, of course, is a trick answer. There is no main character in James Joyce’s last novel; there are no characters to be perfectly honest, there is only despair from thousands of literary scholars and critics at having to work through that novel, infuriating piece by infuriating piece. And here comes Clay Shirky with the absolute audacity to talk about “group dynamics” by pilfering his book title into the absolutely cliché “Title: Very long subtitle about the subject whereas you could just read the book jacket, that’s what it’s there for you know.” template. I’m betting my Snorlax Pokémon card that Shirky hasn’t even read Finnegan’s Wake, but no feel free to piss all over the place and take what isn’t yours. Thanks a lot, Clay Shirky. Thanks a lot.

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Fitzgerald and his literary elbows.

Now this is literary fiction.

“There,” admitted Washington, “I grant you that. But try to think of an alternative. I’ve offered to have all or any of you painlessly executed if you wish. I’ve offered to have your wives, sweethearts, children, and mothers kidnapped and brought out here. I’ll enlarge your place down there and feed and clothe you the rest of your lives. If there was some method of producing permanent amnesia I’d have all of you operated on and released immediately, somewhere outside of my preserves. But that’s as far as my ideas go.”