2500 Random Things About Me Too — A book composed of lists, though the first thing that happens is you forget you’re reading a list and see everything else. Here’s an excerpt from the first few pages, an interview in 3am Magazine, the article “How I Wrote a Book on Facebook” that The Huffington Post asked me to write, and my aesthetic statement on it from Les Figues book, Trenchart: Surplus.
- “My favorite books teach me how to think, or how to stop thinking; they encourage me to adopt a more permissive, openhearted, curious relation to the mind’s taxations. Matias Viegener’s 2500 Random Things About Me Too is such a book; it kindly provides a rest cure for my linguistic apparatus — the brain’s word-machine, a system of weights and measures, of pulleys and levers, that frequently experiences shutdown. Reading Viegener, I hope to learn from his authorial equanimity, the simplicity and tact of saying only the things that matter, whether or not they strike the scrupulous, monitoring consciousness as merely random.” — Wayne Koestenbaum in The Los Angeles Review Of Books.
- “Bracketed by three deaths—his mother’s, his friend’s and his dog’s—Matias Viegener’s 2500 Random Things is an extraordinary capture of a life and a consciousness in middle age, when mortality and the grid of associations laid by one’s personal history cannot be denied. Chained to the task of compiling these ‘random’ lists, Viegener creates a self-portrait—of the whole world!—that encompasses everything from Descartes to the grooming habits of parrots, with plenty of sex, beauty and boredom. Compulsively readable, the book is a brilliant achievement. I could not put it down.” — Chris Kraus
