why so many hits?

My post on Circus Philosophicus (and the fictional aspects of it) from earlier today has already had more hits (by midafternoon) than anything on this blog since the Egyptian revolution. Why so much interest in that point? Maybe Levi has more readers than I realized and they’re all following that link.

But yes, I apparently managed to convince a lot of readers (without trying to) that it’s a literally autobiographcal work. Given that the book begins with a colossal ferris wheel which is clearly fictional, and ends with an obviously absurd group of people meeting an obviously absurd cigar-chomping Chicago literary agent, I never would have expected to be taken as a non-fiction author in the middle.

This is a weird skill I have sometimes. You have to understand that I never tease people, or almost never. Some people enjoy making up false stories and kidding their friends for 15 or 30 seconds, then saying: “Just kidding!” You know the type.

Now, nothing wrong that type of person; many are very funny. But it gives me a terrible sense of guilt to deceive people for even a few seconds, and thus I almost never joke around like that.

I really make only one regular exception for myself: April Fool’s jokes. And it turns out that I am extremely good at those. Normally skeptical people often fall for even my most absurd April 1 yarns. Maybe that’s why I can pull it off every April 1 so well: people aren’t used to me teasing them.

Some of my best-ever April 1 pranks:

*convincing friends back home that the Aswan High Dam had burst and all of Cairo had to evacuate within hours

*convincing many readers of this blog on April 1, 2010 that I was leaving academia to become an ESPN SPORTSWRITER.

*convincing many readers on April 1, 2009 that I was moving to the (non-existent) AMERICAN UNIVERSITY IN ANTARCTICA.

*convincing a very good friend in 2001 that I was leaving the American University in Cairo for the American University of Beirut, and that AUB’s American faculty quota was exhausted, meaning that I had to take Lebanese citizenship and do Lebanese military training all summer long; that one was swallowed hook, line, and sinker, to my everlasting amazement.

And now the middle chapters of Circus Philosophicus, sandwiched by blatant fictions at the beginning and end, seem to be taken for autobiographical fact by dozens of readers.