Thursday, April 21, 2005

Sources

1. From the first page of Edgar Rice Burroughs's Tarzan of the Apes (1912).

2. From the opening of W.H. Mallock's A Human Document (1892). This novel forms the source text for Tom Phillips's novel of erasure, A Humument.

3. "The Ridiculous Vision of Mark Leyner," NYT, 9/13/92

2 comments:

Quailty said...

I can't believe how long that Leyner feature is. Was it the *cover* of the NYT mag???

Also, love the cameo from DFW, "author of Girl With Curious Hair":

"If the purpose of art is to show people how to live, then it's not clear how he does this," Wallace says of Leyner. "I've written him letters about this, and it angers him."

!!

Ed Park said...

1. What does he mean by that "If"? (Could it be that that's *not* the purpose of art?)

2. And if we in fact agree that that's the purpose of art, couldn't we argue that ML's stuff teaches us how to live in a media-saturated society by (a) seeing/extracting the absurdity/humor in it, or else (b) letting the stuff mold one's self-conception?