Pointless Pursuit: My Year of Picaresque Personal Ads

A petty act of revenge in the form of a droll online personal ad generated appreciative fan mail, turning the author's head, and leading to this, an embarkation on a year-long project of writing and posting story-style "personals" on Cragislist. Readers have described these vignettes (with admiration) as byzantine, ridiculously obscure, and slapstick. A true parody of the genre, filled with historical trivia and tinted by a nostalgia for the past, this folie a deux of fiction and fact mixed up to surrealist proportions will leave you breathless and bewildered, but happy to have been along for the ride.

"A few errant lines from the book: "

I was born in the same Roman casino and at the same moment that King Farouk died. My mother had gone into labor presumably from the shock incurred by having been unjustly accused of counting cards...

I have my share of unfulfilled dreams...such as running my own cock-fighting emporium in Mexico and reconstituting the Flying Wallendas, but as world-class touring canasta players...

My grandfather also once told me that he had eleven days of whoopee with a young English novelist. They schtupped the stuffing out of each other, under the "L" in a vermin-ridden room of a salesmen's hotel...

I would flee Vaduz, and that world of dusk-ribboned ceilings of fixed arcadia. That world that had greeted me with ormolu sunsets was one that had also sent me off with those unknowable, sickly strains plumbed from the depths...

When Mother entered the room, she discovered Roman wearing only a stippled foulard scarf, violently thrashing Father's behind with a wangee cane...

If I had the prescience to detect the loosening shards that would litter my path, I would have intensified my exertions and joined Michael Rockefeller's expedition to Irian Jaya...Recently, I moved to Manhattan and took up with a Peronist-what the hell was I thinking?

As a trusted intimate, I taught King Albert the finer points of mountaineering and showed Leopold III how to drive his sports coupes...

It was the Cleavers and Bobby Hutton who liberated me. Their demands for seaweed wraps and eye treatments expanded horizons such as I had never known...

My companion must effortlessly exhibit sartorial splendor and show me that he has the ambition to acquire an inverted Jenny...