Joe,
In your essay The Great American Media Mind Warp, you wrote: "Like a holographic simulation, each part refers exclusively back to the whole, and the whole refers exclusively back to the parts. All else is excluded by this simulated reality." Those two exquisite sentences instantly brought to mind the B. Kliban cartoon of a man with a tube connecting his brain to his asshole in the (for me at the time) paradigm shifting book Whack Your Porcupine.
Although Kliban's cartoon originally satirized "the intellectual", the image wouldn't go away as I read your essay on yet another aspect of the Hologram -- the worn out expression "shit for brains" suddenly acquired a whole new dimension of meaning to me. Or maybe it's "brains for shit", maybe we as a society are literally defecating our brains and using fecal matter to fill the void behind our eyeballs -- that would certainly explain the facial expressions of any number of talking heads you care to name.
And Kliban should be glad he's dead, by the way. I mean drawing the cartoons he did with a name like that: Q(aida) + (Ta)liban. The letters in his name probably add up to 666 too.
Coming up next time, my appreciation of your book or how a Seventh Day Adventist upbringing in orange grove suburban San Bernardino County, California, can have an amazing number of parallels and weirdly sympathetic vibrations to the Southern reality you wrote about in your book.
And congratulations on the Echinacean Whore. It's acts of microsabotage like that that give me courage in the face of our destiny -- or as the Norwegian poet Jan Erik Vold said: "We're doomed and we never give up"!
John in Norway
------
John,
Yours is the funniest insightful email I've received in ages. I never imagined they grew such good dope in Norway. Thanks for taking the time to make my day.
Your friend,
Joe
