Selective. Memory. Select… Me… S.M.

"I don’t know, though I do wonder (literally) what the effect exponentially-growing mass input of (mostly junk) data might be doing to our noggins. Maybe the effects lean more towards dissolving privacy and reflective time—when does a person think if interruptive stuff is coming into your head at all points of the day, with the brain trying to interpret incomplete and ambiguous strings of sensory inputs?

     Seems scary to me. Maybe memory is affected, maybe it makes it go away, shriveled because recollection is being eliminated. Or demented like the wonderful Yossarian (his first name is John, btw) from Joe Heller’s beautiful Catch-22 who develops for himself a condition in which he remembers everything twice (whatever that means).
     It would be interesting to see a war of societies in which the sides were a culture that remember nothing versus a culture that remembered everything. The unspeakably lovely Jorge Borges wrote something touching on this in 'Fumes the Memorist,' in which the humble narrator is capable of forgetting nothing, being able to recall explicitly everything within eyesight, perfectly—the problem is though that it takes a day to remember the events of another day. What would happen in such a culture where everyone forgot nothing? "
— John F. Ptak, Ptak Science Books
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Funny you should write that...

"The British sense of humour is famous around the world but what kind of literature makes them laugh? It seems the ideal amusing read for Brits would be a mind-boggling combination of P.G. Wodehouse's sublime wit, a liberal dose of Joseph Heller's black humour and a slice of Douglas Adams' galactic comedy.

     Our UK website, AbeBooks.co.uk recently asked 555 of its customers to name the funniest book they had ever read. Right Ho, Jeeves, Catch-22 and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy were the top three. Eight of the top 10 authors were British but Americans Heller and John Kennedy Toole also featured prominently."
— Richard Davies, Abe Books
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"What do the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour judges find so funny about a couple of murderers?
     For the past two years, the prestigious medal has been won by works of dark humour.
     'People are saying "What’s so funny about The Sisters Brothers (by Patrick deWitt) when it’s about a couple of murderers?”' Mike Hill, president of the Stephen Leacock Association, said. 'It’s really dark material.'
     The Sisters Brothers won the medal this year while Practical Jean, by Trevor Cole, won in 2011.
     'It’s about a woman who goes around murdering her friends,' Hill said of Practical Jean. 'We’ve had two years in a row of very dark material winning.'
     Prompted by the public’s reaction, the Stephen Leacock Association will be having a discussion on defining humour at its annual general meeting Sunday.
     Joseph Kertes, dean of the school of creative and performing arts at Humber College in Toronto and a former Leacock Medal winner, will be leading the discussion.
     'Humour is very subjective,' Hill said. 'I think it changes over the decades. The Leacock Medal has reflected that evolution.'"
— Sara Ross, Orillia Packet & Times
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Battle Babble

The compulsion to be verbally creative in the face of an intrinsically absurd pursuit probably comes out of a deep need to veneer chaos with poetic order.

"The U.S. military’s nickname for the no-fly zone in Libya sounds like the beginning of a long adventure. But Defense Department officials insist that there’s no hidden meaning behind 'Operation Odyssey Dawn.' It’s just the product of the Pentagon’s semi-random name-generating system….
     The modern system… came out of bad PR experiences in the Korean and Vietnam wars, according to Lt. Col. Gregory Sieminski’s brief history of 'The Art of Naming Operations,' published in Parameters in 1995.
     Nicknames like 'Operation Killer' during the Korean war and Vietnam’s 'Operation Masher,' Sieminski wrote, caused controversy when reported in the press….
     Coalition partners in the no-fly zone [Libya] have their own operation names. Britain’s Ministry of Defence labeled its participation in the no-fly zone 'Operation Ellamy'*; Canada’s efforts are called 'Operation Mobile.' Ever a patron of the arts, France seems to be the only coalition partner going for the poetic route. It calls its operations in Libya 'Harmattan,' referring to a 'hot, dry wind that blows from the northeast or east in the western Sahara.'”
— Adam Rawnsley, Wired
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*"The randomly generated codename, 'Ellamy,' is an alternate spelling of the Early Modern English word, Elami (E-la-mi), a musical solmisation designating the note E in the context of a tetrachord.[19] The spelling 'Ellamy' is found in a poem frequently attributed to John Skelton, The Harmony of Birds."
— Wikipedia
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"[Joseph] Heller’s twisted logic is best instantiated by a description of the many difficulties facing a pilot named Orr:
      'There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one’s own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn’t, but if he was sane, he had to fly them. If he flew them, he was crazy and didn’t have to; but if he didn’t want to, he was sane and had to.'
     Joseph Heller, it seems, created something transcendental, for Catch-22 applies everywhere. Its brilliantly absurd logic permeates the very fabric of life. It walks among us, cloaked in the veils of respectability and regulation, waiting to madden and infuriate. Anyone who has ever had dealings with the innermost bowels of government bureaucracy will know exactly what I mean."
— Alex MacPherson, the Sheaf

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Buy Catch-22 by Joseph Heller here...

"It is important to expect nothing, to take every experience, including the negative ones, as merely steps on the path, and to proceed." — Ram Dass

From: COVERBROWSER

Rejected...
"[...] Stephen King (on Carrie): We are not interested in science fiction which deals with negative utopias. They do not sell.
    Joseph Heller (on Catch–22): I haven’t really the foggiest idea about what the man is trying to say… Apparently the author intends it to be funny – possibly even satire – but it is really not funny on any intellectual level … From your long publishing experience you will know that it is less disastrous to turn down a work of genius than to turn down talented mediocrities.
     George Orwell (on Animal Farm): It is impossible to sell animal stories in the USA.
     Oscar Wilde (on Lady Windermere’s Fan): My dear sir, I have read your manuscript. Oh, my dear sir.
     Vladimir Nabokov (on Lolita): … overwhelmingly nauseating, even to an enlightened Freudian … the whole thing is an unsure cross between hideous reality and improbable fantasy. It often becomes a wild neurotic daydream … I recommend that it be buried under a stone for a thousand years.
     The Tale of Peter Rabbit was turned down so many times, Beatrix Potter initially self-published it.
     Lust for Life by Irving Stone was rejected 16 times, but found a publisher and went on to sell about 25 million copies.
     John Grisham’s first novel was rejected 25 times. [...]"
— The Girl & Her Books
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Imprinted

From: Book of Joe

Some iconic titles are associated, in my mind at least, with certain colours. Apart from The Little Red Book ("The Quotations of Chaiman Mao") by Mao Zedong, the next book that comes to mind is the plain, dark red cover of the ubiquitous Signet paperback edition of J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye; followed by the blue of Joseph Heller's Catch 22 cover. My favorite red cover is the hardcover edition of The Stories of John Cheever.
     I remember picking a copy of Alvin Toffler's Future Shock from a display case of the paperback edition; it was available in four or five background colours. (Back in the Seventies all sorts of bestsellers were coming out with this option.) I picked the white one — I'm sure of that because it's still on my bookshelf.
     More recent titles seem to be lost in a swirling, blendered dazzle of the entire spectrum—print technology has turned the discipline of the fifties and sixties (design choices that maximized impact and minimized production costs) on its ear... or eye. And with the advent of e-books and digital publishing in general, the notion that the contents can forever be associated with the colour of the package, for books at least, will become a thing of the past.
— Michael Hale