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11 June 2008
Fahrenheit 451. If you had to memorize one book for future generations what would it be?
Jack Womack: Random Acts of Senseless Violence because it would help explain how come no-one reads or has books to read anymore and how we could not notice it happening.
It would have to be "Green Eggs and Ham" or "Goodnight Moon" because my poor brain could never manage to store a whole book in it. I moved almost a year ago and still don't know my own land-line number.
Probably Brave New World, if I could memorize things, but I have what octothorpe has--never pursued music more seriously in school because I couldn't memorize things. :(
The AA Big Book. Because, you know, it saves lives. I just wish it wasn't written in the language of 1939 America. The chapter "To Wives" is pretty cringeworthy. I know I'll sound stupid reciting it but, oh well.
Unless the world as we know it sort of collapses, "One Fish, Two Fish" because right now, mostly only small people get read to.
If we are in a sitting around a campfire situation, wait - if we KNEW we were gonna be sitting around campfires, and someone could book me reciting gigs in advance - I'd do Faulkner and Joyce, and Louise Erdich and Carolyn Stone. Sweeping Epic things. I mean, if you're gonna recite, recite. For an hour a day, like a serial. I'd travel from emcampment to encampment, and stay for a month. If it could be my lucrative, post-end-times job to memorize books and recite them, I would do it. I don't know what I'd do for humor. Would Donald Barthelme make for good storytelling? I'm a little tentative about that.
My all time favorite non-fiction book, How to Lie With Statistics. Not only a vital guide to survival in any modern/post-modern society, but also a short book (under 150 pages, with illustrations) so I could memorize it all (and do pantomimes of the illustrations).
My favorites tend to shift around, so I wouldn't be satisfied by one, but right now it might be Bridge of Birds the finest example of Sherlock Holmes and Watson being redone in ancient China, starring a 100+ year old Daoist scholar as Holmes and a giant young peasant as Watson, to ever see print.
Fahrenheit 451, just because it would be so meta. "Whoa, dude, that story is like describing what's happening right now!"
Wait a sec, it wouldn't be meta at all, the metaness would collapse in on itself, "Yo, dude, that's not a book, you are just talking about everyday and shit."
"Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds" if I wanted to be instructive, and "The Good Soldier Svejk" if I wanted to be entertaining, plus as many Mullah Nasrudin stories as I could cram into my brain.
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