Today I was reading about this book called The Dead Guy Interviews, which is these imagined interviews of 45 of the most interesting/important dead people out there. Of course I have no interest whatsoever in actually reading this book, because dude, they're dead, so it's 45 cases of the author interviewing himself. I don't even care enough to remember the author's name. What I do care enough about is whether Oscar Wilde was one of them. Turns out I care a lot about that. I care enough to go a-hunting to ascertain this information; while the Amazon page was failing to load, my brain was thinking, If the internet can't find this out for me, I guess I'll have to go to the library this afternoon and check in the book itself. And then I was like, Better yet, I'll swing by the university library right after work, and then if they don't have it there I'll just go to the public library on the way back from swimming (P.S., the public library is in no way "on the way back" from swimming), and if they don't have it there I'll just run by Bongs & Noodles...
Happily, the Amazon page finished loading before I could plan what I would do if the university library didn't have it, and the public library didn't have it, and Bongs & Noodles didn't have it. But it could easily have involved calling the publisher.
And yes, Oscar Wilde was one of the people.
Of course.
As if there was any doubt.
Cause, I mean, if the dude's interviewing interesting people, of course he must interview Oscar Wilde. Oscar Wilde was probably the first person he thought of when he conceived the idea for this book. I mean who wouldn't want to interview Oscar Wilde?
I'm very vain of Oscar Wilde. I'm always pleased when other people like him too. When I found this out from Amazon, I felt really proud, like the same way I feel when I'm showing people the South Bank of London. It's like, Yes, that's right, this is one of my things. Feel free to admire it at your leisure. Yes, yes, it is magnificent, isn't it? Oh, why, yes, thank you, I found it all by myself.
Nevertheless, taking an objective step back from this moment, I'm pretty sure it makes me not a cool person. I'm pretty sure this is one of those things about myself that I should keep to myself (but I don't because I want to brag about Oscar Wilde's ubiquity), like how I always, always flip straight to the indexes of nonfiction books to see if he's in the index, and then if he is I check out what they're saying about him and make judgments of the books on that basis. (Seriously, though, the man is in a lot of indexes. If it's a book about the gays, he's always in there. Him and Foucault.)
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