I’ve just started reading Victor Pelevin’s Homo Zapiens, easily one of the funniest texts I’ve read, especially for a class. Here are some favorite excepts:

On a Che Guevera t-shirt with “Rage Against the Machine” inscribed on it:

...in the area of radical youth culture nothing sells as well as well-packaged and politically correct rebellion against a world that is ruled by political correctness and in which everything is packaged to be sold.


Every time you wake up, you appear again out of nowhere. And so does everything else. Death just means the replacement of the usual morning wakening with something else, something quite impossible even to think about. We don’t even have the instrument to do it, because our mind and the world are the same thing.

My personal favorite: The idea for an advertisement.


An elegant, rather effeminate Hamlet (general stylization – unisex) in black tights and a light blue tunic worn next to the skin, wanders slowly around a graveyard. Beside one of the graves he halts, bends down and picks up a pink skull out of the grass. Close-up: Hamlet knitting his brows slightly as he gazes at the skull. View from the rear: close-up of taut buttocks with the letters ‘CK’. New camera angle: skull, hand, letters ‘CK’ on the blue tunic. Next frame: Hamlet tosses the skull in to the air and kicks it. The skull soars upwards, then arcs back down and falls straight through the bronze wreath held by a bronze angel on one of the graves, just as though it were a basketball hoop. Slogan:

JUST BE. CALVIN KLEIN