LOOK BACK IN PASTA: My Reason article about the Flying Spaghetti Monster is now online. A quick footnote: In the time since that story appeared in the print edition of the magazine, the statue has been removed from the courthouse grounds, along with the other spiritual statuary mentioned in the piece. Apparently, faced with a choice of allowing every religion or no religion to have a place on public property, the local authorities have opted for a clean lawn.
LETHEMANIA: My new column for Reason is a report from a conference on copyright that I attended last week. One of the speakers there was Jonathan Lethem, so here, in his honor, is a passage from Fortress of Solitude:
I considered now that what I had once loved in this record, and certain others -- Remain in Light, "O Superman," Horses -- was the middle space they conjured and dwelled in, a bohemian demimonde, a hippie dream....It was the same space the communists and gays and painters of celluloid imagined they'd found in Gowanus, only to be unwitting wedges for realtors, a racial wrecking ball. A gentrification was the scar left by a dream, Utopia the show which always closed on opening night.
My mom, who knows I'm a Lethem fan, lent me her copy of Fortress of Solitude a while ago, and I've been lazy about returning it. I brought it along to the conference and got the author to sign it for her -- which seems a little odd, now that I think about it, considering the relationship between the book's protagonist and his mother.