"It was a big shock, then, to grow up and discover that this was not actually true—that the big famous highly anthologized names printed on all my book spines referred, in fact, to physical human beings with bodies and vomiting sisters and (in rare cases) shoes even more shameful than my own. The insight came to me only gradually, through a series of disorienting revelations. I once saw Jacques Derrida, for instance—the reigning high priest of French theory, a man so intimidatingly abstract I imagined he pooped exegeses—shuffle out of a lecture hall and load his papers not (as I’d expected) into a rickshaw pulled by grad students or onto the shoulders of cynical chain-smoking French angels but into the trunk of a bright-red Daewoo sedan—a car as terminally lame as any my family had ever owned, and which he then proceeded to drive slowly across a parking lot indistinguishable from the anti-intellectual parking lots of my youth." - William Harryman from Bookmarklet

"This was a powerful, tender, humanizing, even revolutionary moment for me. The great empire of Western thought, I came to realize, had been founded not on metaphysics and griffins’ wings but on hairbrushes, socks, cutoff jean shorts, headbands, wastebaskets, and Daewoo sedans. I became fascinated by the gulf between literature’s abstract power and the trivia that always attends its creation. A great author’s toothbrush (or manuscript or cane or razor) is like a saint’s relic—a little rip in the space-text continuum, a wormhole through which the private abstract ecstasy of reading manages to stream in to the real world. Soon I started hunting earthly remnants of the literary gods. I visited Victor Hugo’s house in Paris and Charles Dickens’s house in London, where I wrote some words with what I was told was Charles Dickens’s pen. In Dublin I spent a summer reading Ulysses in the heart of Ulysses territory. " - William Harryman

hehe "pooped exegeses". Seriously though, I know there's more to this than that. Nice post - Kamilah Gill