Maybe a better explanation for his decision to base his collection on high school life, and to give it a dark cast, is that a number of young novelists, like Benjamin Kunkel and Jonathan Safran Foer, have created an agitated, post-Holden Caulfield generation of characters.

Note the "gold lamé evening pajamas with an organza hem."

Researchers at Washington University and the University of Pittsburgh used five imaging techniques to map the brains of 764 people. The subjects fell into three groups - people in their 20s, and older people with either early-stage dementia, or Alzheimer's disease.

When they compared images, they found that parts of the brain involved in musing, daydreaming or recalling pleasant memories in young people were where evidence of Alzheimer's disease appears.

Then again, this is only a theory, as suspicious as any theory emerging from the academic cess pool of evolutionary psychology. All the same, I recently found a rare picture of reclusive Calvin and Hobbes cartoonist Bill Watterson on a photo gallery of famous cartoonists, and, well, look-what-we-have-here: Watterson's an exact composite of Calvin's Uncle Max and Calvin's dad, down to the folds of their clothing's fabric and the angles of their elbows:

[Have other examples of artists resembling their creations? Share them with me at cupofchicha at aol dot com.]

Related Reading: "And Then I Realized Why She Looked Familiar"

Both campaign spots (introduced fifteen minutes apart in last week's Veronica Mars broadcast) finish off with couples holding up their newly acquired chicken sandwiches -- but, before the boy's allowed to bite, the girl instructs her suitor in cutting-edge McDonalds-eating etiquette. McDonalds' Premium Chicken sandwiches, much like a porcelain cup of tea, should give well-cultured hands erections-of-the-pinky, stiffening the littlest finger while curling in the others. The girl's voice-over continues: "Juicy chicken breast, crispy or grilled, in my kind of flavors ... It's a five-star taste worthy of my two-finger salute." And the boy, his fingers now correctly salutory, finally gets the go-ahead to eat.

The campaign, one presumes, is aiming to depict McDonalds' newest offerings as simultaneously up-market (hence, the effete pinky) and affordable (hence, the street-credified -- albeit imaginarily so -- hand gesture). In that sense, the pinky functions like marketing's beloved hipster: well-educated and artistically-inclined but also shaggy and of-the-people. Fortunately, the diminutive pinky can't bear so much symbolic weight, and McDonalds' idea of a slogan-ified finger only comes across as laughably -- and proportionately-- short-sighted.

Yup. That's all you gotta do for a book deal -- pop some pills.

I could have sworn you had to actually do something impressive, like, say win a Nobel Prize (like physicist Richard Feynman's Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!) or at least have an extraordinary story to tell (like Jeannette Walls' Glass Castle or Marjane Satrapi's two-volume Persepolis)....

As one who reads for thoughts and language and rarely plot, I'd like to suggest that the boring and insignificant among us can sometimes write worthy memoirs, too. Edmund White's Story of a Boy didn't require Appalachia; Woolf's diaries didn't require Iran. More importantly: we deem A Bell Jar worthy reading despite its similarities in subject matter to Elizabeth Wurtzel's much-loathed Prozac Nation.

By critiquing recent memoirs in terms of what their writers have or haven't lived through, Parvas sets up the wrong axis for measuring autobiographies' worth. If anything, Parvas's preference for certain types (and amounts) of experience mirrors the same disinterest in the language and quality of a memoirist's introspection that "wasted youth" memoirs 1) encourage and 2) are encouraged by.

(Updated: picture link now works.)

Wen Shi

Degree: Johns Hopkins University: B.S., Biology, 2004
Proposed Oxford Subject: D.Phil., Medicine
Career Aspirations: Physician-scientist



After emigrating from China to the U.S. in 1999, Wen Shi initially attended classes in English as a second language. By the time he graduated from high school in 2001, he had excelled in ten Advanced Placement exams, including AP English, and had won numerous awards in national and state math and science competitions. In his three years at Hopkins, Wen has finished his Bachelors degree with Phi Beta Kappa honors and has completed all core courses for Ph.D. candidates in Biology. Outside the classroom, Wen has taught other immigrants English, volunteered at Hopkins Hospital AIDS clinic and responded to medical emergencies on campus. Wen co-founded an organization through which Hopkins undergraduate and medical students teach sex education to incarcerated youth. As Vice President of Alpha Phi Omega Service Fraternity, he organized 3,800 student-hours of projects in 2002-2003. Wen received the President's Student Service Award for his leadership in campus and community events. He facilitates diversity roundtables and serves on the Hopkins Diversity Leadership Council. Wen has also become a regular guest on Voice of America, telling his immigrant success story to a world audience. Since freshman year, Wen has conducted research at the Hopkins School of Medicine on the cardiac toxicity of cancer drugs, work that has earned him Howard Hughes and Woodrow Wilson Fellowships and a Goldwater Scholarship. He will pursue a career in academic medicine, "dedicating myself to the conquest of cancer."

I asked him if he didn't think Marcus's work communicated a feeling of unease or disorientation.

Yes, he said, but what's the worth in that?

(I was feeling aggressive -- and aggression, being rare for me, gives me the impression of adventure. So, I pressed on:) If you admit that Marcus does communicate something, I've got to wonder if you care more about what's being communicated than the success of communication -- which is a different argument than the one that you were just making.

Maybe, yes, he's communicating something, the writer said. But what I meant was that he doesn't engage with the world. That's what good fiction does.

The world? I laughed. What's the world?

Talk about relativist, he said. Talk about abstract. The world is ... what it isn't is someone like DeLillo or David Foster Wallace or Ben Marcus going on about the difference between brown and white cardboard for ten pages.

Brown and white cardboard are still part of the world. Everything is part of the world, I said. And when I hear people use that word, I wonder if they're claiming what they think matters most in the world is the world.

(The argument continued, and I went home later than I meant to.)

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I still don't have bookshelves in my apartment. Right now, I'm sitting in my living room, looking at the twenty-three moving boxes that hold my books. In my world, there's not much else besides cardboard.

Since I leave clothes on the floor, and rarely remember to wash dishes, and haven't made a bed in years, my boyfriend's made it clear he doesn't want me unpacking 400-something books without a place to put them. But when he's not looking, I slice the packing tape with a kitchen knife, hoping the box I've chosen randomly has the book I'm missing. Everyday, I think of a new book to miss. And, lately -- since last week -- I've been missing Derrida -- the writer who, in college, more than any other writer, I counted as my own.

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The writer at the bar claimed I was being too abstract when I asked him what he meant when he said "the world." But I think he's got it backwards. Words and phrases like "communication" or "the world" are hopelessly abstract, and a question shouldn't be called abstract for pointing that out and demanding definitions.

What Derrida's texts encourage is a lack of complacency with abstractions, and the values hidden in them. Some may call poststructuralistm Anti-Humanist because it points out that words like "universal" and "human" are often political, cultural, and -- to my mind -- manipulative -- undermining people's right to disagreement by claiming a Truth that only the immoral or elitist among us could ever wish to reexamine.

Derrida's texts may be difficult to follow -- what can you say clearly when you're interoggating the accepted clarity of abstract concepts? -- but the questioning he inspires is also very simple. A playwright could turn him into a modern-day Socrates -- disorienting his companions with simple questions that point out tautologies and find the fracture lines in arguments.

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I was never studious enough to become an academic. And, due to vanity or its opposite, I prefer critiquing my own thoughts to critiquing others' (even if, in the long run, others' thoughts might sharpen self-critique). So, I'm sure that I had classmates who read more Derrida than I did, and understood him better, too. But, like children pick favorite numbers and favorite colors -- as if numbers and colors could inspire a natural alliegance -- I picked Derrida as "my" contemporary thinker. The choice was only partly intellectual; it was largely autobiographical.

Jacques Derrida, one of France's most famous philosophers, has died at the age of 74.

Derrida, who suffered from cancer, died in a Paris hospital on Friday night.

... Derrida, who was born into a Jewish family in Algeria, published his ground-breaking work in the 1960s and went on to achieve enormous influence in academic circles, especially in America.

But in 1992, staff at Cambridge University in the UK protested against plans to award him an honorary degree, denouncing his writings as "absurd doctrines that deny the distinction between reality and fiction".

Derrida also campaigned for the rights of immigrants in France, against apartheid in South Africa, and in support of dissidents in communist Czechoslovakia.

He was so influential that last year a film was made about his life - a biographical documentary.

At one point, wandering through Derrida's library, one of the filmmakers asks him: "Have you read all the books in here?"

"No," he replies impishly, "only four of them. But I read those very, very carefully".

... a wagon wheel: the spokes must be connected to the hub, or graceful movement is impossible. -Mary Gordon
... a knife--strongly made, well balanced, and with an absolute minimum of moving parts. -Michael Swanwick
... a sniper's bullet. Fast and shocking. -Jeffery Deaver
... a slap in the face. It must immediately sting, make itself known at once, and it must leave a red mark for hours to come. -Martin Booth
... a commando operation. You have to get in quickly, set your charges, and get out, leaving the reader to be caught up in the blast. -Michael Chabon

... Quarter horse racing ... Novels are like Thoroughbred racing. -Marian Bray
... a motorcycle - very exciting, very fast and dangerous, but I wouldn't want to ride one across Europe. -Jonathan Carroll
... an airplane: it has many parts and flies only if it built with a careful eye on science and engineering. -James Wallace Harris
... a child’s kite, a small wonder, a brief, bright moment. - Sean O’Faolain

... a time-capsule. -Clive Barker
... a snapshot. -The Writers Bureau

... looking through a keyhole. A novel is a 360-degree panoramic window. -Matthew Klam
... lighting your way through a dark cave with a tiny birthday candle. -"Avi"
... being in a darkened room, [and] a novel is like being in a darkened field. -Dan Chaon
... a kiss in the dark from a stranger. -Stephen King
... a kick in the teeth in the dark from a stranger. -Cory Doctorow

... having an infatuation, while ... a novel is like having a marriage. -Lan Samantha Chan
... engaging in a brief affair, [and] writing a novel is more like a marriage. -Sarah Edgson
... something you could do in a fit of passion ... Writing a novel is more like a marriage. -Mary Morris
... a weekend guest, [and] a novel is like a divorced relative staying with you. -Lev Raphael

... screaming out loud. -Isabel Allende
... a dream; it follows its own rules. -Isabel Allende
... an arrow that has one shot ... while a novel is like embroidering a tapestry. -Isabel Allende

... a tightly argued summation in a trial, whereas a novel is the whole case. -Michael Dorris
... a revelation, [and] a novel is an evolution. -Unattributed

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There is no technically convincing theory of the short story -- it is technically a genre, not a form, but resists the definitions that usually cluster around both. There is the defining length (an unedifying fifty-page range), there is the short story's lonely voice from a submerged population (Frank O'Connor's famous hypothesis) and there are various "slices of life" ideas and notions of literary apprenticeship ... All of these convey what happens sometimes -- what happens a lot -- but in lieu of a truly winning overriding theory, we should rely perhaps on simple descriptions, in which case the more the merrier. Let me throw some inot the pot. Many that I've heard -- and used myself -- are fashioned as metaphors comparing shorter and longer narratives, attempting to define the one through its relationship to the other. A short story is a love affair; a novel is a marriage. A short story is a photograph; a novel is a film. A short story is a weekend guest; a novel is a long-term boarder. A story is a brick; a novel is a brick wall. And my favorite, the assymetrical a short story is a flower; a novel is a job.

... Unlike novels or poems, but more akin to a play, the short story is also an end-oriented form, and in the best ones the endings shine a light back upon the story illuminating its meaning with both surprise and inevitability. If a story is not always, therapeutically, an axe for the frozen sea within us, then it is at least a pair of brutally sharpened ice skates.

-- Lorrie Moore, Best American Short Stories 2004

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Patenting a simile for the short story may be every author's birthright, but one would hope authors recognized the lack of originality behind, and resulting from, the impulse. Strangely, though, even the most original writers can lose their taste for novelty when writing about the craft of the short story. Even if their language remains lively, their metaphors wry, their voices charming and assertive, they end up offering facile, unadventurous, ideas. What is a short story? Something compact and pure, a poem by way of story, a universe in miniature, etc.