getting realness
“One evening in February, two Stanford University seniors, Steve Yelderman
and Ian Spiro, were presiding over the weekly staff meeting of The Stanford
Chaparral, the college’s humor magazine. Spiro, a thin and gangly
computerscience major with a mop of brown hair, thick sideburns, and
metal-frame glasses, was about to unveil his radical idea for the annual
Chaparral parody issue.
Typical Chaparral issues are glossy compendiums of cartoons, lists,
dialogues, photo journals, and short articles, but once each year, in the
grand collegiate-humorist tradition, the editors produce a parody of a
national magazine. In its hundred-and-five-year history, The Chaparral has
targeted such publications as Fortune, Sports Illustrated, and Playboy.
Yelderman and Spiro, however, felt that the genre had been exhausted. At the
meeting, Yelderman, an athletic-looking electrical-engineering major who
wears hip-nerd plastic glasses, announced the solution: “This year, rather
than parodying National Geographic or Saturday Morning Cartoon magazine,
we’re going to be parodying an unbound pile of paper.”
Spiro broke in. “Most magazines come bound, with a staple,” he said. “We’re
trying to do something that’s never been done. We’ve already got a pretty
good Chinese menu going.”
Staffers began tossing out story ideas-scratch-off lottery tickets,
rejection letters, instructional manuals, cult solicitation pamphlets.
“There’s been a lot of talk of applications, or rejection letters,”Yelderman said. “Maybe a pre-rejection from Harvard Law School?”
“How about a PowerPoint presentation?” someone called out.
“How about a werewolf PowerPoint presentation?” someone else countered. “It
could have silver bullet points.”
A few people brought up distribution questions: what would distinguish the
Pile of Paper issue from, say, a pile of garbage? Before long, a list of
story ideas had been generated, and the concept had evolved from a random
collection of papers to one found on a particular person’s desk. “We started
to see a character emerge,” Yelderman said.
A couple of weeks after the first meeting, Spiro and Yelderman held a
marathon writing session; the plan called for Chaparral staffers to work all
weekend and to complete the Pile of Paper issue by Monday morning. They had
given the presumptive owner of the Pile of Paper a name-Ronald Rembrandt
DeLa Duffy-and filled out much of his profile. He was something of a loser,
as suggested by job-rejection letters from AeroMexico, a disciplinary letter
from the Federal Communications Commission (for using profanity on his cell
phone ), and pathetic to-do lists. He had received a variety of odd
pamphlets and advertisements, including one offering the “Power of
Inconvenience” and another for “Feria, Mild Neural Toxin” (the product’s
slogan: “Is he too talkative?”). He had come into possession of the bizarre
Chinese menu and the WolfCo PowerPoint presentation.
The parody, however, seemed to move further from completion as Sunday wore
on. “Normally, we have the content a little more under control at this
point,” Spiro said. The problem was that almost anything lying around the
office offered a potential story. Just after 6 p.m., Yelderman decided to
make a mockup of a printer test page, the document that prints to show that
a printer is working properly.
“Just because we can print a printer test page, that doesn’t mean we
should,” a staffer complained.
“I don’t know if anyone has ever published one in the history of
publications,” Spiro replied.
“No one has ever printed a picture of my ass before, either.”
The editors agreed to table the idea, and everyone went back to work. Spiro
and another student spent several hours trying to find the right tone for a
pro-smoking advertisement, titled “When History Happens . . . Smoking Is
There.”
By 8 a.m., nearly all the stories were completed. Spiro and Yelderman
decided to call it a night. As the staff wandered out, someone asked if
anyone still thought the Pile of Paper idea was funny. “I think it’s
hilarious,” Spiro said. He picked up the finished stack of stories and
flipped through it. “In some sense, we have succeeded in our rudimentary
goal. I mean, this is a pile of paper.” Evan Ratliff
world library screen
“The
World Digital Library will make available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from cultures around the world, including manuscripts, maps, rare books, musical scores, recordings, films, prints, photographs, architectural drawings, and other significant cultural materials. The objectives of the World Digital Library are to promote international and inter-cultural understanding and awareness, provide resources to educators, expand non-English and non-Western content on the Internet, and to contribute to scholarly research.”
gaga
A
blog to follow
Gray Areas to Green Areas is just starting.
the south americas
FotB is going to Arequipa, Peru. We will report on libraries as timeless portals and the high cultures there before history as still adventuring out of time itself.
“The historic centre of Arequipa is an outstanding example of a colonial settlement, challenged by the natural conditions, the indigenous influences, the process of conquest and evangelization, as well as the spectacular nature of its setting.”
the americas
The
Goldwater Library on-line of the Metropolitan Museum has kindly linked to FotB.
