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Eventually, I knew something with Albert Camus would turn up on The Youtubes, which should be renamed JesusTubes, because it is as awesome as Jesus, and maybe even more influential. I don’t think I’ve ever seen video of Albert Camus before, but here he is being interviewed at a soccer game in Algeria, the country he was born in. I hope this is dubbed because he has a funny Goddard scoundrel type voice that I don’t think fits his writing.

Dave Eggers, author of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, and Valentino Achak Deng, Sudanese refugee and subject of Egger’s new quasi-fictional biography What is the What?, spoke tonight at the Margaret Mitchell house. It was one of those typical writerly events, free cheese with $10 admission, annoying introductions (what for?), no drum solos, minor technical difficulties. Dave didn’t speak much about his writing as most of the time was spent interviewing the affable Valentino who spoke about the tragedy and fortune that led him to the US. Interestingly enough, the aspect that moved me the most wasn’t so much the genocide tragedy (which, like all of them, are so awful they are difficult to even process) but Valentino’s emphasis on the fact that he did not suffer, that he escaped the suffering, and that those who didn’t escape are the ones who suffered. Now that, is fucking human. Survivor guilt was palpable, paralleled with the first-world status guilt of the audience, most of whom were not refugees, and whose lives nowhere approached this level of tragedy. Whose most taxing dilemmas stem from having too many choices to contemplate. How we labor over freedom, if we have the luxury.

Frequent man.under.stress contributor and former book reviewer, “chilly,” or in the preferred Taoist nomenclature, “chi-li,” began podcasting interviews with friends and acquaintances, the unsung celebrity of the everyman sort of thing, some time ago. Well now he’s expanded the service into a full blown blog, complete with the continuing series of podcasts, PLUS, psychedelic arcana, all things Asian and much, much more. And so far he’s out of the gate and running, with sometimes more than one daily post. That’s more than I can say for my sorry ass. When Chi-Li is not slurping a Starbucks mocha frapp in the comfort of his Tarantino shrine, we can assume he’s hard at work finding interesting things for you to contemplate. So check out and bookmark The 10,000 Things.