Afternoon diversions

March 23, 2005

• Inspired by recent events, writer Tod Goldberg presents a sort of online living will indicating the situations in which he does not want to be resuscitated. He also asks for assisted suicide in certain instances:
  

  5. If I begin to re-read Gravity’s Rainbow again just to see, finally, what the fuck I’m missing out on, end it.

• Jaime J. Weinman presents “A Style Guide for Blog Parodists,” including those who opt to write from the point of view of literary characters like Madame Bovary or Hiawatha. In the style of the latter, Weinman offers:
  

  Welcome to the blog I’m blogging,
  Me, the warrior Hiawatha.
  One with love and one with nature,
  Though my internet provider
  Doesn’t work by force of nature–
  Doesn’t work at all, some mornings.

• Weinman also has a piece — “Love Letters of a Closed-Captions Editor and a Telegram Operator” — up at McSweeney’s today. “The key to getting accepted [at McSweeney’s], apparently, is to write something where the whole joke is in the title,” he explains.

• Writer and critic Rick Perlstein donned a Scott McLemee t-shirt at the National Book Critics Circle award ceremony last Friday night in support of the proposition that editors should “get their heads out of their asses and realize that part of their job is looking for unacknowledged talent.”