Board

If essays published on the Internet are disposable (and they are, although they paradoxically live forever), the comments on those pieces are even more so. But there are gems to be discovered, if you know where to look, and Benton and Listi know.This collection of stray sentences and paragraphs and online exchanges was culled from many thousands of comments beneath the main pieces at a popular literary website. The authors are in a sense archeologists, and in a sense collage artists, unearthing forgotten wit and wisdom from hundreds of different (and funny and insightful and wise) people, polishing them up, and presenting them in a cohesive way -- not unlike curators at a museum for lost words.Are the comments worth preserving? I had my doubts, but goodness, yes. The closest analog to BOARD is F. Scott Fitzgerald's book THE CRACK-UP -- which is singularly appropriate, when you consider that the name of the site these comments were pulled from is called The Nervous Breakdown.