Pseudobibliophilia

At Salon, Laura Miller writes about...invisible libraries.

The original Invisible Library disappeared from the Web in the mid-2000s (though you can still find snapshots of it in the Internet Archive Wayback Machine), and since then other pseudobibliophiles have opened their own "branches," although these too have a tendency to end up abandoned. The novelists Ed Park and Levi Stahl created a catalog of imaginary titles that inspired an interactive exhibition at a London art gallery, but they have only occasionally updated it since 2008. Loss of interest is, perhaps, inevitable, since when you maintain such a list, tiresome people are constantly proclaiming their disappointed astonishment that their particular obscure favorite isn't listed.

Actually, Levi and I still update our Invisible Library—our "site" is so primitive (i.e., it's a blogspot blog) that we need to keep those 2008 timestamps intact in order to preserve alphabetical order. In other words, we need to get a real site. (No comment about the "tiresome people" statement.)

If you thought we were lying low, you might have missed this one from a few months ago:

SHEFFIELD, (Professor) Peter: Who Indeed: A Critical Analysis of Television's Who's the Boss?; What WAS Happening: An Analysis ofWhat’s Happening?;
—from Community (season 2, ep. 20)

Believer notes

I. Out now: You're a Horrible Person, But I Like You: The Believer Book of Advice, edited by contributing editor Eric Spitznagel. The SFBG quotes Zach Galifianakis’ “ways to kick-start a satisfying life”:

1. Start reading Teen People

2. Rent a stretch Hummer to go see Noam Chomsky speak

3. Model your life after the movie Sideways, but instead of wine make your passion Mountain Dew

4. Ask a state trooper where the closest gay bar is

5. Have a Super Bowl party with no television

II. Not too late to get the Believer's film issue! The Karpo Godina DVD is

III. Speaking of the film issue—Salon will occasionally be featuring McSweeney's content. Up now: Elif "The Possessed" Batuman's "Seven Unproduced Screenplays by Famous Intellectuals," also in the current issue (film) of The Believer. (But you should still get the issue itself.) Here's a taste:

Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer

In Los Angeles in the 1940s, Frankfurt School philosophers Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer spent nearly six years working on a screenplay about prejudice. The final draft, titled "Below the Surface," features a violent commotion on a subway car, during which a woman carrying a vacuum cleaner either falls or is pushed onto the tracks. A one-legged peddler tries to rally the passengers against a Jewish man, who had previously jostled him. At the end of the film, the audience is to be polled regarding the guilt or innocence of the Jew; other audiences might be shown a similar film in which the Jew would be substituted by a "Negro" or a "Gentile white-collar worker." "Below the Surface" was batted around Hollywood for years, subjected to numerous scriptwriting consultations, and pitched to the likes of Jack Warner and Elia Kazan. It was never produced.

IV. In the NYTBR, David "Reality Hunger" Shields likes Ander Monson's Vanishing Point: Not a Memoir, which features material first published in The Believer. Shields writes, "Memoir is dead. Long live the anti-memoir, built from scraps."