In the spirit of Kierkegaard, I will now reveal that I am the beneficiary of one of the great thinkers of our time, Cliffson Wolf, who entrusted me upon his death to publish and publicize his great work of philosophical, autobiographical, anarchist, dadaist, anti-neo-Hegelianism: Tripe.
Marvel if you will upon this mind-bending work of unadulterated genius. (Later edit: I have a PDF now too.)
Here is an excerpt for those of you who are too lame to click on the above:
Spelling for me has always been hard, so I won’t attempt to relate to you my last name and the story behind it, but I will say this: I am someone other than yourself (probably), and you are basically alone, a lonely soul reading tripe. You may then see me as your friend, and may even see me as such when I say I hate you (which I might later say), but you will be in some small part wrong, for I think — and please take this in the most tentative way — I think that I hate you. Nonetheless, you are basically alone, even and especially in a third grade classroom during storytime, so you really have no choice but to be touched by the personal tone that I use here, as well as that tone used later in describing things that are personal, which is also a personal tone. You will thus not only continue reading, at least for another page, but appropriate me, not me as an actual person but me as a conduit for tripe, as another voice within your head, as an objectification of that part of you that, during a passionate kiss, makes you unable to divert your attention from the subject of hairballs — that part of you that, during the hairball competition, distracts your attention with thoughts of a passionate kiss. Most people fail to cultivate this part of themselves, but it never goes away, and if it does… well, it never does, but if it did, you would be much too boring and efficient and you would have to be hit by a bus just to put the universe back in balance.
Here’s that link again, in case you missed it.
Here is a different link, except that it is the same link.
-Mark Linsenmayer
Any chance of getting a .pdf version of this work so that it could be loaded onto a Nook/Kindle/Sony ereader?
Might there be a possibility of “Tripe” being available in .pdf format so that it could be loaded onto a dedicated e-reader?
I wouldn’t think that I’m the only person who doesn’t much care for extended reading at the computer monitor.
Thanks.
Joe
…I’m working on this. It’s in a very old mac format right now, converted without much respect for pagination to PC Word so long ago that my current version of Word can’t open it.
-ML
Your wish, she is granted: http://partiallyexaminedlife.com/2010/12/06/tripe-the-full-pdf/
What a sense of humor. My fellow co- workers sometimes look at me at the office when I laugh cos of the jokes mark makes on the partially examined life podcast. So glad to have discovered it.