“Andy went out drinking with his friends from work one night and they stayed out very late. It was about 4:30 in the morning when he was finally walking up Broadway on his way home. The neighborhood was completely silent. Just north of Aldine, a very cute young guy appeared from a side street. He made eye contact with Andy and said, ‘Hey.’
That’s the opening of Rob Christopher’s book, 100 Spinning Plates. At least it could be. It could just as easily be the ending–though the laws of probability say it will likely turn up somewhere in between.
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“Welcome to the world of Random Literature,” beckons the “cover” of 100 Spinning Plates, which is actually a cardboard box. Conceptual kin to those Magnetic Poetry fridge magnets, Christopher’s book consists of 100 stories written on 100 cards. Some stories are a solitary line or a single paragraph long; most are several paragraphs; a few mini-epics carry over to the back of the card. “They’re all self-contained,” Christopher says. “I wanted a book that would be completely nonlinear–like hypertext, but I think it’s better to have physical cards. It’s a perfect book for someone with a short attention span.”
Though many of the book’s vignettes have an autobiographical flavor–Christopher worked as a barista for years, and there are lots of scenes set in coffee shops–he doesn’t identify them as fact or fiction. “I think our memories are sort of fictionalized versions of what actually happened,” he says. “We fictionalize it to make it more interesting and smoothed out so that it’s vivid and easier to remember. So while a lot of the events really happened, some of them didn’t, or happened differently. I want to keep the reader guessing. If you’re reading the book and constantly asking yourself, ‘Did this stuff really happen? Is it supposed to be a memoir or is it fictional?’ then it means you’re engaged–and hopefully drawn in to the point where you want to read the next card to try to get some answers.”
