These instructions were in your Young Male Reader packet that they handed out on your 20th birthday. Said packet should have also included something by Ayn Rand. The Fountainhead or Anthem – I think it was a grab-bag situation.”

No, I’ve never read The Razor’s Edge. I guess I kind of have to now.

My Ayn Rand phase was when I was 21, and even today I have a fairly extensive collection of Rand philosophy books. I’ve read The Fountainhead about four times. I can take or leave the philosophy, but damn, I love that book.

Siddhartha. Check.
On the Road. Check.

My Ayn Rand phase was eclipsed by my Henry Miller phase at 22. I love that bastard too. Derrek says that he writes like every word should have an exclamation point attached to it, and it’s so true.

I think I was late to the party with a lot of these books because they didn’t have Superman in them.

These instructions were in your Young Male Reader packet that they handed out on your 20th birthday. Said packet should have also included something by Ayn Rand. The Fountainhead or Anthem – I think it was a grab-bag situation.

And that would be two more examples I have to look up. Thanks, Nick.

I’m ashamed I’ve never read CEREBUS.

Two of my favorite examples of this are when W. Somerset Maugham comes to Elliot’s emotional aide while on his deathbed, and when Dave Sim inserts himself into the Cerebus storyline.

“…consider the remote possibility that if you are reading/watching someone reading/watching someone, then someone could be reading/watching you. The levels are infinite going the other way, so why do we automatically assume it begins with us?”

With the Sim/Cerebus storyline, Sim enters the story to tell Cerebus that that he is his creator. C. tries to deigns it’s happening, suspecting he might be going crazy. Sim refuses to relent – he knows how stubborn and willfully ignorant his character is – and eventually resorts to threats of torture to get C. to acknowledge his existence. Sim then spends a whole chunk of the narrative trying to straighten the guy out so he can recover from the misery in the time alloted (it was well-known that Sim was going to make Cerebus a 300-issue novel). He even shows him points in the past story where, if he’d done things differently, he could have drastically altered the course of the story. Eventually, Sim reveals that even though he is Cerebus’ creator, he’s not THE creator. This idea holds and then comes back blazing at the end of the series, where Cerebus is pegged as the Prophet of the One True God (by the three stooges, no less). It’s at this point that Sim gives up all pretensions to narrative and real life separations, and cobbles his story together with threads of Cerebus plot, Woody Allen films, Biblical criticism, and the real lives of the Stooges (Howard, Fine, et al). And I won’t even begin to mention all the Sim philosophy heaped on as well…

If you can’t tell, Sim became a religious zealot a little over halfway through his Cerebus story (which he recounts in the narrative) – a strange amalgam of xianity, Judaism, and a very thick vein of Islam. Which brings me finally to fundamentalist religions – especially those who espouse that reality is already written by a supreme being: this is LIFE in metafiction…

“And because our memories are funny things, when I think about that afternoon, my brother is right next to me at that kitchen window, even though one of us really wasn’t there, and neither of us were even tall enough to see out that window.”

And I spent about four months at approx age 9-10 without the ability to walk. At least this is what I believed for many years, until I was in my mid-twenties, when my mom told me I was full of shit and must have dreamt it.