“One flip,” Donnovan said. He laid his palm on the table, pulled it away - revealing an old, shiny quarter.
Rammy agreed behind him, the humming wordless way he used to agree with Donnovan - “hmahm”.
“If it’s a head you go back to your cell no fuss, that’s it, and we say goodbye and we part ways, adios.” “hmahah,” said Rammy. “If it’s not we look ( Read more... )

* It was a cold bright day in April and all the clocks were striking eleven-thirty.

* Call me Mike.

* It was an okay time.

* In the beginning, God created Yahtzee.

* Happy families are all alike; unhappy families are also alike.

* Howard Roark picked his nose.

* Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on ( Read more... )

As of now, September first, 2008, I’m the first me in Google. This is a great honor.

I’m also the second, third, fourth and fifth. All the first five Jonathan Silbers, Google says they’re me. It feels great. If you ask Google, there is no denying who, in this entire world, is Jonathan Silber. (It’s me.)

The Google results are as follows: the first ( Read more... )

Well, George Orwell has a blog.

(via Tomer Lichtash)


( Read more... )

Does what you’re writing on change the things you’re writing? If I’ll transfer this first sentence from Wordpress to my MS-Word, will the second sentence be different? What if I change the size of the window? Will a story written in a tiny space be smaller, will it feel claustrophobic to read? What if I write on paper? How much can you fine-tune it ( Read more... )

Someone got in Quotendquote by searching for “flowers, craniums”. This makes such beautiful, senseless sense. Flowers, craniums. Like cloud, dollhouse. Like singe, swim. It sends the brain in two opposite direction so it stretches between them like a rubber band, until it recoils and tears both meanings away and sends them crashing together. Yeah, ( Read more... )

This house is seldom quiet. In the morning, before the city settles into its humdrum workday, it rattles with the subway cars tearing the tracks beneath it and the cars pushing and screaming their horns in the thick traffic. Then, when the city does settle, every two or three moments are marked with an old car dragging its transmission on the ( Read more... )

I want to write in this blog, but more than that I’d like it to be old and huge and forsaken. Imagine it: Quotendquote, a tome of ancient net lore, shut forever in 1998 like the best of the internet. Or like the Mundaneum, a proto-internet one hundred years old , slowly rotting in a freezing Brussels building and covered in geological eons of bird ( Read more... )

On Thursday they announced they were able to distill passion. They would bottle it and sell it in little vials. It would taste terrible, but you could mix it with orange juice. On Friday the world ended.
Another fine post from Quotendquote. Please comment there.

It was a while since I’ve been to his house. As I enter I record everything that has changed: the new piano by the library and the table pushed next to the wall, abd the fresh flowers in the vase, and the new, pretty woman in the foyer.

“Where is he?” I ask. She wears a black dress that doesn’t become her. But she’s pretty; enviably pretty. She ( Read more... )