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SUNDAY
Imagine a collaboration between David Sedaris and David Foster Wallace on a book about the interrelationship of art and anarchy. Now toss in a dash of the mental discombobulation that makes Beckett’s Trilogy such good clean non-Cartesian fun. What you end up with is Mark Swartz’s weird but wonderful Instant Karma, a short book that’s about as funny as it is troubling. David Felsenstein is a bibliophile with an unrequited love for a librarian (“Eve Jablom: a thing of beauty and a joy for none”), a penchant for dadaism, and a burning desire: to “create an art form from explosives” by blowing up his home away from home, Chicago’s Harold Washington Library Center. Why? Well, it has something to do with Hugo Ball, Buddhism, the purifying effects of fire, the necessary purposelessness of art, and the Rabbi Ben Joseph Akiba, who said, “The paper burns, but the words fly away.” And love, of course. But the real joy of reading Swartz’s gnomic treatise (which is written in the form of diary entries) lies in getting to know his protagonist, a man who repeatedly watches “1941 (1979) Spielberg’s other WWII farce, featuring John Belushi at his coked-up best” and who has to seek recourse to “the accurate line drawings and factual prose of Gray’s Anatomy” to “successfully trick out an erection.” This book is recommended to anybody who loves libraries, which Felsenstein describes as “airports for people who aren’t going anywhere and who are picky about what they read.” Swartz is here at 3 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 27, at Olsson’s Books & Records, 1307 19th St. NW. Free. (202) 785-1133. (Michael Little)