Not quite Delphi

October 29, 2003 | Comments Off

An “oracle” appeared in Brooklyn recently, at the corner of Bergen St. and Flatbush Ave.

Here’s how it works: Dean Olsher, host of WNYC’s The Next Big Thing, transmits your questions to the oracle and reads the answers that appear on the oracle’s electronic billbard. But Olsher is cagey about the identity of the Brooklyn author who answers for it.

According to The New Yorker, all signs point to Jonathan Safran Foer:

Olsher is cagey about the oracle’s identity. “The Oracle is a writer who lives in Brooklyn,” he said. Is it Colson Whitehead? It is not. Is it Paul Auster? It is not. Is it Jonathan Lethem? It is not. “I thought you were going to ask if it was Jonathan Ames.” Is it Jonathan Ames? No.

Questioning the Oracle directly about his identity was more fruitful. First, the Oracle was asked for a hint.

Oracle: I’m equally comfortable referencing Nachman of Bratslav and Seka the Swedish Bombshell.

Then the tactics got trickier. The Oracle was told, “O.K. I’m going to ask you a question and if I don’t get a response in five seconds I’m going to take it as a yes: Are you Jonathan Safran Foer?” For once, there was no answer.

Comments

Remainders

• Selected letters of James Salter and his good friend Robert Phelps appear in the current issue of Narrative. Also, Pia Z. Ehrhardt reads some of her work.

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• "This old white motherfucker and his wife rolls up. He’s like, 'Young man, do you know where the Poe house is?'" The Wire and A.N. Devers on Edgar Allan Poe's Baltimore house.

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• The New York Society Library features an exhibition of Shirley Hazzard's (Transit of Venus) manuscripts, photographs, and more, through January 31.

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• Narrative's free app for the iPhone and iPad includes all back issues of the magazine (a couple of which include my writing). I also like to read Electric Lit this way.

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• "[T]o correct a bad sentence satisfactorily is not always possible; it should never have existed, that is all that can be said." -- Fowler

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• At FSG's Work In Progress, Jeffrey Eugenides talks with Jonathan Galassi about the genesis of the "more tightly dramatized, less fanciful" novel he's finishing up.

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• Emma Garman admires Jean-Christophe Valtat's 03, calling the novella "Nabokovian in its outrageously solipsistic stylishness." See also Valtat on the persistence of childhood.

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• Jonathan Franzen says "there isn’t a more hilarious narcissist in all of literature" than Sam Pollit of The Man Who Loved Children, which my friend Robb Forman Dew has been urging on me.

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• I'm back in New York, at least for now, but while I catch up you're better off checking my Twitter feed than waiting on the RSS.

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• ThermoPoetics contends that some ideas about nature — and thermodynamics in particular — manifested themselves in literature before being articulated scientifically. (Via.)

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