So anyway, Laura, as I was saying, I wrote this email to Snarkwatch, just this funny little thing, and The Believer freaking published it!

The editor emailed me and said it was already up online. This kinda freaked me out, and we took it down.

Then it went back up by mistake three weeks ago -- a foul-up where they uploaded old html files or something.

Again, I asked to take it down.

All in all, my letter was online less than 48 hours.

Laura, I agree, it's bad form for authors to defend their book in reviews -- but I wasn't doing that.

I was just speaking up a little bit in an email that got published. I put it on my blog. People can do that in this electronic age.

But thanks for the publicity, I guess you Round Ass.

And If this the most hay you can make over Snarkwatch, I have to admit I'm left wanting a little bit more. As we

[It's piston rod garage time]
It's piston rod garage time
sit down and shut up offers from
fatherly help type, and for me, a world
of aspirin and cues up on the
phone, forms filled, it happens, eye
me up, sweet sweet child, eye me
up, critical one view, unconditional

Rooting through our bookshelves last week, I came upon an object I thought I had lost. A couple years back I went to a show at Deitch Projects in 2000, and part of the show was by a video artist names Johan Grimonprez. It was a show that centered around hijackings, and included a faux in-flight magazine called, generically enough, INFLIGHT. It was for an airplanes about to be hijacked; or, as some catlogue copy says, Initially created prior to 911 the centrepiece of The Art of (Sampled) Memory is the documentary film Dial History made by Johan Grimonprez, a twisted ironic journey through the history of airplane hijackings.

There's articles on the first jumbo jet 747 skyjackings. In light of the 9/11 hijackings, the whole project seems tragically prescient. I stole the magazine from the gallery, although it says it's distributed by D.A.P. Here's the cover:

 

And here's the safety card. I am kind of ashamed to think all of this show was sort of an abstracted put-on, although parts of the magazine, many of them reprints of reports of upending of the status quo -- the pie-in-the-face incident of Bill Gates, for instance -- seems to support that impulse.