about me | matterhorn

Please pop my balloon.

We here at Matterhorn are a plurality derived from one singular shlub, pictured to the right of these words.

We've been him as long as remembering has been possible, and now we're sick to death of him.

J. K. Johnson is the name chosen by our focus groups after our focus groups have been forced to listen to an hour of J. K. Rowling read by a belligerant Slavoj Žižek. Or how about J. K. Huysmans' La Bas as read by Nancy Grace? That'd be a nightmarish hoot, huh? I once nearly bought a book-on-tape reading of Moby Dick as read by Burt Reynolds.

Hey, what if the memory of having read a particular book were transferable from person to person? Like, not the content of the book, but the lingering impression, vague here and precise there, that remains years after a book is absorbed into the fatty tissue of one's permanent record of deep memory. For example: I read the first half of The Anxiety of Influence by Harold Bloom about twenty years ago, and

I have the greasy impression that its thesis was something like: all active, creative readers misread their favorite writers, willfully or not, because that's how you escape the trap of becoming a zombie infected by the author's viral influence (and therefore avoid the embarrassment of waking up one day and finding yourself unable to stop sending livid texts and emails and voicemails over and over again at some commercial enterprise that, until now and after now, can't arouse a twinge of opinion from you). [That's a joke based on Distributed Denial of Service attacks, I hope it doesn't offend you to hear me say].