"Army, Marriage, the Church, and Banking: the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse."

—Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

"Beyond the text lies the Deus absconditus, the hidden, destructive God who may well be simply a human projection, a dangerous idol." —Hans W. Frei, Theology and Narrative: Selected Essays (1993)

A book that is conscious of its own existence?  Not only is that possible, but there's more than one of them.

Tic Tac Tome: The Autonomous Tic Tac Toe Playing Book not only knows your next move as you play a game with it, but when asked in the introduction if it's aware of its own existence, the book asserts its consciousness and then eerily tells the reader that the real question is whether the reader truly exists or is merely a manifestation of its paper-based imagination.  With every round of the game, the reader feels increasingly certain of the book's sentience.

The Young Wizard's Hexopedia reads the mind of its reader throughout, again and again predicting the reader's very next thought or opinion about the information.  In the first chapter the book divines whether or not the reader has begun reading in lieu of a pressing responsibility.  

Clive Barker's demon-narrated novel Mister B. Gone, which increasingly damns the reader's soul with every word read, begs its reader to close its pages and knows if the reader is still there.  The demon explains that this book will do the reader harm beyond description unless the reader does as asked and simply stops reading.  The book can tell whether the reader has trusted the demon and stopped reading.

More subtly, but of special interest to literary critics, in Tom Robbins' Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, the omniscient narrator weaves the reader's consciousness into the novel's by craftily using first-person plural pronouns to transform monologues into dialogues, thus uniting author and reader.  As one analyst has noted, "Suddenly the omniscient narrator reads the mind of the reader, moving beyond the limits of the facade of so-called reality and reminding readers that they too are part of the illusion of truth that a story pretends.  The alienation from the text as truth keeps them aware of the illusion.  The reader colludes with the writer/narrator in the success of the fiction" (Tom Robbins: A Critical Companion).  

Here's all you have to do:

1. All you have to do is listen.  (Rob Kapilow, 2008)
2. All you have to do is ask.  (Meredith Walters, 2007)
3. All you have to do is be the middleman.  (Jay Abraham, Getting Everything You Can Out of All You've Got, 2000)
4. All you have to do is win.  (Trent Frayne, 1968)
5. All you have to do is glance at your calendar.  (Savitri Ramaiah, Lifestyle During Pregnancy, 2003)
6. All you have to do is balance your weight.  (Edwin Burford, Skiing Made Simple, 2007)
7. All you have to do is share your experience, strength, and hope.  (Robert Perkinson, The Gambling Addiction Patient Workbook, 2003)
8. All you have to do is select items from a series of menus and the system does all the work. (Dinesh Maidasani, Comprehensive Information Technology)
9. All you have to do is walk out your front door.   (Howard Wimer, Inner Guidance and the Four Spiritual Gifts, 2014)
10. All you have to do is to hit the RIGHT target with the RIGHT weapon at the RIGHT time.  (J. C. Kemmerer, Tournament Sparring, 2011)
11. All you have to do is be open.  (J. K. Ellis, Perfected Mind Control, 2006)
12. All you have to do is to make it happen.  (Terence Hamilton-Morris, Spirit Rises, 2013)
13. All you have to do is cut your calories and watch what you eat.  (Dag Albright, Chicks, 2007)
14. All you have to do is sort out your own theory of direct mail.  (Tony Attwood, Education Marketing, 2005)
15. All you have to do is think properly.  (Charles Mangua, Son of Woman in Mombasa, 1986)
16. All you have to do is be still and tap into the energy.  (Danielle Garcia, Angel Blessings, 2008)
17. All you have to do is put that down.  (Zane, Infinite Words, 2015)
18. All you have to do is live the life.  (Angus Buchan, Now is the Time, 2014)
19. All you have to do is decide what you want to change.  (Nevaeh Michael, Fall in Love Again, 2012)
20. All you have to do is start.  (Leo Babauta, Zen to Done)
21. All you have to do is send people to the offer and hope they buy.  (Tracy Repchuk, 31 Days to Millionaire Marketing Miracles, 2013)
22. All you have to do is change your thoughts.  (Theron J. Houston, I Once Was Lost, 2009)
23. All you have to do is have Ralph watched when he comes into your city.  (Jeff Inlo, Soul View)
24. All you have to do is state firmly but in a friendly manner, "No thanks, I have other plans."  (Keys to Learning, 2007)
25. All you have to do is get out of your comfort zone and be ready for new experiences.  (Romy Miller, How to Be the Man Women Want, 2009)
26. All you have to do is find a sheet of words, the words being colours.  (Michael Robinson, 10 Ways to Enhance Your Mind and Become More Efficient, 2013)
27. All you have to do is sit back and wait for the money to start rolling in.  (Marketing your Ebook)
28. All you have to do is work backwards and precisely calculate what has to happen to make that journey.  (Getting Everything You Can Out Of All You've Got, 2013)
29. All you have to do is circle all that apply.  (S. F. Berk, The Gender Factory, 2012)
30. All you have to do is simply attend.  (Jonathan C. Smith, Relaxation, Meditation, & Mindfulness, 2005)
31. All you have to do is list what you want out of life and then sign your name at the bottom.  (Alternate Gerrolds: An Assortment of Fictitious Lives, 2013)
32. All you have to do is believe, let go of the past, and move forward!  (Tammy Lynn Robinson, Thoughts of the Heart, 2013)
33. All you have to do is show up.  (Nancy Whitney-Reiter, Now is the Time to Do What You Love, 2009)

Hotels are places people come to sleep, and thereby hotels are imbued with the dreamtime.  A recent study sought to explain why it's difficult to sleep that first night in a hotel -- it's apparently quite a widespread phenomenon, "sleeping with one eye open" -- but the study didn't mention what seems most obvious, that a hotel is saturated with dreams, and as we all know it's difficult to re-enter a dream that has been interrupted.  Plus, hotels are places with many, many rooms, which is significant.  We're reminded of a snippet (a passage we didn't already know but which we went searching for just the same, as one does), from Wild Nights by David Deida.

From Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping: "There is so little to remember of anyone—an anecdote, a conversation at table.  But every memory is turned over and over again, every word, however chance, written in the heart in the hope that memory will fulfill itself, and become flesh, and that the wanderers will find a way home, and the perished, whose lack we always feel, will step through the door finally and stroke our hair with dreaming, habitual fondness, not having meant to keep us waiting long."

This is just to confirm that every haunted chamber should feature at least one "ghost closet" (see upstage center).  Our diagram appears in Grace Griswold's The Haunted Chamber: A Romantic Comedy in One Act (1921).  To design your own haunted chamber, see our guide to Seance Parlor Feng Shui.

(According to the internet, Buddha really did say this!)  "What's all this?  There's a path, so just go and find it!  What's with you guys?  You want me to solve all your problems?"  From The Hero Yoshihiko and the Key of the Evil Spirits (Yuusha Yoshihiko to Akuryou no Kagi, 勇者ヨシヒコと悪霊の鍵).  The scolding Buddha is played by comedian Sato Jiro.

On the very same day, Yiddish for Pirates and El Galeón arrived in town.  This feels like what Carl Jung called "meaningful coincidence."

Here's our take on "going with the flow."

They say that everybody has a novel inside them, but that's patently false.  If you don't have a novel inside you, there may at least be an article that inspires someone else's novel.

We're gobsmacked that our groundbreaking research into the relationship between pirates and parrots ("Buccaneer Birds and Parrots of the Caribbean," first published in Amercian Cage-Bird Magazine, March 1993) went on to be an inspiration for acclaimed author Gary Barwin's novel that's narrated by a parrot pirate, Yiddish for Pirates.  This qualifies as a Retroactive Lifetime Goal (phrase used courtesy of literary humorist Jonathan Caws-Elwitt).

Unrelated except in the sense of the Barwinism that underlies all that we see and hear, Gary Barwin has dreamily transformed our recording for the Poet Laureate of Calgary, in which we set to clockwork music the punctuation of an otherwise-erased page from Andy Warhol's a: A Novel.  Here's an mp3 of the otherworldly Barwinian transformation:

We're hoping that this vintage item we posted was the inspiration for this Frog Applause entry.  The source of the imagery is Politische Zeichnungen by Franz Masereel, 1920.

To talk the talk as you walk the walk, you must walk a straight alphabetic line, as we learn in Trattato della Pittura by Leonardo da Vinci.

"I want to redo my life, from before the moment of my birth."  From the Fuji TV series Ghostwriter (ゴーストライター).