People ask him where his head is at.

Robbed a bank, no weapons, no one hurt in the process.
Caught, detained sans contest, claims the money is spent, entirely gone.
In Jail, writes, does so happily.
Happens that money went toward sponsoring 47,805 African orphans.
Bank insured, patrons lose no money.
10 years later, upon release, appreciates life more.

---------------

WHAT IS WRONG WITH THIS STORY, IN A MORAL SENSE?
WHAT RASH ASSUMPTIONS ARE MADE, IF ANY?
IS THE WORLD IN THE REALITY OF THE STORY A BETTER OR WORSE PLACE AS A RESULT OF THE ACTIONS UNDERTAKEN?
DEFINE 'FAILURE'.

He'd be a fucking killer whale.

From an interview with Mark Z. Danielewski:

You swim on a regular basis – what’s your favorite stroke?
I love butterfly. I love it. It’s exhausting, but there’s something about butterfly that is magical. If you get the rhythm right, the force of the stroke itself hurls you through the water and you have this sense of rising out of the water. So it’s ego and submission and ego and submission. It’s awesome. There’s also an ability to abstract it. With freestyle, you can’t do more than freestyle. But with butterfly, you can imagine that if I had slightly longer legs and a big fin, I’d be flying out of the water. If I could go even faster, I’d be a fucking killer whale.

Lately, in Burma.

Meanwhile, in Burma.

Someplace far, far east of here.

A 14 year old boy is tied to a tree on the cusp of a promontory
While a line of five adults and one little girl stand five metres away
Viewing him
With verdant pastures and weatherworn shanties beyond
And law a bygone thing.

(The line of people are holding rocks --
Ancient rocks.
They are set to throw them at the 14 year old boy tied to the tree.)

The little girl steps forward:
Timothy K. Dawson, she says,
The people agree that you have run out of chances --
Do you have any final words?

Timothy K. Dawson looks upward to the girl --

Makes no noise.

(Leviathan waves detonate upon the cliff face below.)

The line of people draw back their arms --
And in that instant Timothy K. Dawson is visited by a thought:
What did I do to these people?
This is the only thing he ever wants to know
As six fatal arms sling down like judgement
Someplace far, far east of here.

Charlie Kaufman speaketh.

I finally got my hands on a copy of Synecdoche, NY. It is mad. Asylum-grade mad. I love it more than anything else in my life at the moment. Here is a passage (Caden = protag, Madeline = his therapist):

CADEN

Oh, I wanted to ask, how old are
kids when they start to write?

MADELINE
Varies.

CADEN
Could a four year old keep a diary?

MADELINE
There's a brilliant novel
written by a four year old.

CADEN
Really?

MADELINE
'Little Winky.' By Horace Wood.

CADEN
Cute.

MADELINE
Hardly. Little Winky is a virulent anti-semite, who
works in a gin mill during prohibition. The story
follows his initiation into the Klan, his introduction
to the pornographic snuff industry and his ultimate
degradation at the hands of a black ex-convict, with
whom he embarks upon a homosexual affair.

CADEN
Wow.

MADELINE
He killed himself at five.

Now you know what I mean.

This here afterglow.

I just finished reading Against The Day. It's big and plucky and brilliant. Every page nurses a line/paragraph/turn of phrase/idea so drop-dead magnificent that you have to stop, backtrack, re-read it immediately. The language here is a drug; you will read the book in big, greedy, breathless binges. This bit, for instance, on page 805, which I hereby declare The Definitive Passage of ATD, an apt distillation of 1,085 wondrous pages:

It went on for a month. Those who had taken it for a cosmic sign cringed beneath the sky each nightfall, imagining ever more extravagant disasters. Others, for whom orange did not seem an appropriately apocalyptic shade, sat outdoors on public benches, reading calmly, growing used to the curious pallor. As nights went on and nothing happened and the phenomenon slowly faded to the accustomed deeper violets again, most had difficulty remembering the earlier rise of heart, the sense of overture and possibility, and went back once again to seeking only orgasm, hallucination, stupor, sleep, to fetch them through the night and prepare them against the day.

May you fly toward grace, Mr Pynchon, sucking us all along in your slipstream.