Category Archives: literature

Add these to your reading list

These are some of the odd books unearthed for the Diagram Prize which is awarded each year to the book with the strangest title.

Yes, these books are real.



All Dogs Have ADHD


Baboon Metaphysics: The Evolution of a Social Mind


Beyond Leaf Raking: Learning to Serve/Serving to Learn (Essentials for Christian Youth)


Bombproof Your Horse


Curbside Consultation of the Colon


Excrement in the Late Middle Ages: Sacred Filth and Chaucer’s Fecopoetics


Fancy Coffins to Make Yourself


The 2009-2014 World Outlook for 60-Milligram Containers of Fromage Frais


How Green Were the Nazis?


How to Shit in the Woods: An Environmentally Sound Approach to a Lost Art


Insects Are Just Like You and Me Except Some of Them Have Wings


The Big Book Of Lesbian Horse Stories


Living With Crazy Buttocks


Malformed Frogs


Oral Sadism and the Vegetarian Personality


People Who Don’t Know They’re Dead: How They Attach Themselves to Unsuspecting Bystanders and What to Do About It


The Art and Craft of Pounding Flowers: No Ink, No Paint, Just a Hammer


I Was Tortured By The Pygmy Love Queen


Reusing Old Graves: A Report on Popular British Attitudes


Proceedings of the Eighteenth International Seaweed Symposium


Squid Recruitment Dynamics


The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification

Tattooed Mountain Women and Spoonboxes of Daghestan: Magic Medicine Symbols in Silk, Stone, Wood and Flesh

(via)

On Existence

“He saw that even in an age of science and unbelief our ideas are dreams, styles, superstitions, mere animal noises intended to repel or attract. He looked around the ring of munching females and saw their bodies as a Martian or a mollusc might see them, as pulpy stalks of bundled nerves oddly pinched to a bud of concentration in the head, a hairy bone knob holding some pounds of jelly in which a trillion circuits, mostly dead, kept records, coded motor operations, and generated an excess of electricity that pressed into the hairless side of the head and leaked through orifices, in the form of pained, hopeful noises and a simian dance of wrinkles. Impossible mirage! A blot on nothingness. And to think that all the efforts of his life – his preening, his lovemaking, his typing – boiled down to the attempt to displace a few sparks, to bias a few circuits, within some random other scoops of jelly that would, in less time than it takes the Andreas Fault to shrug or the tail-tip star of Scorpio to crawl an inch across the map of Heaven, be utterly dissolved.”

John Updike, in his story Bech Panics.

When I came across the stark snippet above, it made me think of similarly stark passages spoken by Wolf Larsen in The Sea Wolf by Jack London:

“What do you believe, then?” I countered.

“I believe that life is a mess,” he answered promptly. “It is like yeast, a ferment, a thing that moves and may move for a minute, an hour, a year, or a hundred years, but that in the end will cease to move. The big eat the little that they may continue to move, the strong eat the weak that they may retain their strength. The lucky eat the most and move the longest, that is all. What do you make of those things?”

He swept his am in an impatient gesture toward a number of the sailors who were working on some kind of rope stuff amidships.

“They move, so does the jelly-fish move. They move in order to eat in order that they may keep moving. There you have it. They live for their belly’s sake, and the belly is for their sake. It’s a circle; you get nowhere. Neither do they. In the end they come to a standstill. They move no more. They are dead.”

“They have dreams,” I interrupted, “radiant, flashing dreams–”

“Of grub,” he concluded sententiously.

“And of more–”

“Grub. Of a larger appetite and more luck in satisfying it.” His voice sounded harsh. There was no levity in it. “For, look you, they dream of making lucky voyages which will bring them more money, of becoming the mates of ships, of finding fortunes–in short, of being in a better position for preying on their fellows, of having all night in, good grub and somebody else to do the dirty work. You and I are just like them. There is no difference, except that we have eaten more and better. I am eating them now, and you too. But in the past you have eaten more than I have. You have slept in soft beds, and worn fine clothes, and eaten good meals. Who made those beds? and those clothes? and those meals? Not you. You never made anything in your own sweat. You live on an income which your father earned. You are like a frigate bird swooping down upon the boobies and robbing them of the fish they have caught. You are one with a crowd of men who have made what they call a government, who are masters of all the other men, and who eat the food the other men get and would like to eat themselves. You wear the warm clothes. They made the clothes, but they shiver in rags and ask you, the lawyer, or business agent who handles your money, for a job.”