Nonlinear. Discontinuous. Collage-like. An assemblage.

Author had a revelation the other day that is potentially monumental in its implications:

Remember Jackass? The one where the guy uses the facilities in a hardware store?

Well, I know where that hardware store is.

Astounding, isn’t it?

Yes, I know things like the location of random hardware stores.

Ok, in all seriousness I’m sharing this in light of a book I just finished called Vanishing Point by David Markson. Markson is known for his avant-guard writing style, and this book in particular is more like a long list than a novel. Here are some examples of the text:

Richard M. Nixon, after the shooting by National Guardmen of four undergraduates at Kent State University, re college students protesting the Vietnam War:
Bums.

Art is not truth. Art is a lie that enables us to recognize truth.
Said Picasso.

Bordeaux, Goya died in.

So in a book made of what are essentially lists, where is the narrator/protagonist?
At his infrequent appearances, he insists that he is trying to keep himself out of the story, a mission at which he wholly fails. The author is in everything-the quotes and recollections are the fabric of his life. (The author’s presumed death is the book’s end) What his sense of humor was like, what he saw as beautiful, what made him retract in horror-it’s all here.

On the off chance that anyone decides to give this book the time of day, I won’t get into more detail. But it makes you think. And I laugh at the fact that while the author’s web consists of classical artists and literature and philosophy what’s in mine? Jackass. Nice.