Mark Fullmer

Sitting outdoors at a coffeeshop one warm California night, Nick Courage’s My Life as an Aerophyte parted on the table and my mind adrift among good memories, I suddenly understood what I would do for my friend the author on his upcoming 27th birthday (which is, decidedly, an important one…after all, you’re 3³).

You see, via email over the past months, Nick and I had been philosophizing art, lifestyle, objets petit a & jouissant memory as part of his friend of a friend interview project, and more recently we’d turned to philosophizing Biography. I’d said something playfully self-pitying about how no one would write books about we who practice art out of the mainstream limelight. Nick countered, asserting that he was actively biographing me and his other friends. He said he was trying out a new form of recognition of those who art or live artfully. He said “Art is obsession, art is lived, it's cathected – imbued with the collective experiences of the artist - and then, on top of that, somehow transcendent, divine.”

It got me thinking (as Nick often does) and I started considering what it all really meant. Who and what is and is not worthy of document? In the web 2.0 era of demokratizedinformation, who is the real arbiter of significance? If an artist arts in the forest and no one’s around to recognize it…?

In a flash of intuitive insanity that summer night, I determined to trumpet our mutual friend, Nick Courage—and in nothing less than, yes, a Wikipedia entry.

Wikipedia! It seemed to me just the kind of illegitimate legitimacy that Nick would find ticklishly amusing. The aesthetic challenge would be to write in that fact-based, objective drawl of the online encyclopedia–I’d have to put literary pretensions aside and instead write in stark truths, but I figured that if this could be done well with anyone’s life, it would be Nick’s. Also, Wikipedia style prohibits any original research on the subject, so I’d have to cite all statements I made. Fortunately, with his autobiographical My Life as an Aerophyte and his A Mutual Respect blog posts, Rachel Rabbit’s punkish podcasts and what Lad Tobin terms Nick’s “admirably prolific FB page,” Nick Courage was ripe for referencing.

That evening, pilfering gems from the above sources, I completed that Wikipedia entry and submitted it to the site the following morning. Reading it, I was delighted how the pure facts of Nick’s life read so fascinatingly (you can read the entry at tinyurl.com/nickcourage). I spent an hour fantasizing pranks to surreptitiously inform Nick—anonymous email from the Wikipedia staff?—of his newly and dubiously distinguished documentary.

But that’s just the story I had to tell to get to the real one: within hours, a Wikipedia editor flagged the page, claiming it didn’t meet requirements by “failing to demonstrate that the subject, a living person,” was “important or significant.”

Goaded on by absurd desire to teach Wikipedia a lesson, I argued over the next hours with no less than three editors why “the subject” was indeed both important and significant. I pointed out that Andrei Codrescu had praised Courage’s “fearless use of facts in their soup of feelings, a fresh sort of daring in the overstrained broth of contemp am po.” I cited Edwin T. Merrick’s description of Triangulating Happiness as “breadcrumbs for the wary to depart upon the journey for themselves, reassuring that when they finally seek the path for themselves they might find it.” I offered to add this line to the entry (which in my mind already reeked with self-evident significance): His works are significant for pioneering current trends in Brooklyn-centered avant-pop aesthetics through web 2.0 and social networking sites.

No avail. At 10:33am, the page was, in Wikipedia’s twee terminology, “speedily” deleted.

That’s not the moral of the story, of course. I didn’t think the page would actually survive, not really, and the whole exercise was just really a moment of diversion for someone with too much free time and even more respect for Nick. Nevertheless. Nevertheless!

Stop and consider that phrase “important and significant” (not that I would ever for a moment grant Wikipedia the role of arbiter of such criteria), and realize along with me who it really belongs to.

So here it is, a much better idea than a silly wiki entry: a collection of favorite Nick Courage moments by those who know his importance and significance best. In their own words.

Enjoy, and love, and biograph!