“Is not advisable, nor was it ever advisable, to lead a Dada life. It is and it always was foolish and self destructive to lead a Dada life because a Dada life will include by definition pranks, buffoonery, masking, deranged senses, intoxication, sabotage, taboo breaking, playing childish and/or dangerous games, waking up dead gods, and not taking education seriously."

So writes Andrei Codrescu, who has written the definitive Posthuman Dada Guide, a far more useful circum-navigational tool than the Luxe City Guides if you ask me. Dada would chew the ear off Monsieur Luxe and use his children to feed rabbits in the train station kiosk.

Such a life, lived even without the handy advice of Dr. Codrescu, has nevertheless been chosen, it seems, by a little old woman with a big smile called Mirka Mora. A women who threatens the legal system with poetry, and is known to sometimes, perhaps not often enough, appear almost naked in public.

I was a young boy when I first saw her. It was evening and my father was breaking into a large case of wine, without a bottle opener. (These were the years before screw tops, a thought we would have gasped at then.) There was an old goods-lift, which took us up one floor to the art gallery above, which was already full of people. If felt hot and dangerous up there, airless and drunken. Suddenly a women, she must have been sixty five at least, climbed onto the table and began speaking loudly above the crowd, languidly pealing off her clothes till she stood, amply and slightly aglow, in her lingerie. If I was writing a coming of age story about surfing, I’d say that this was my first erotic encounter.

Fully clothed, Mirka Mora dropped by this week to inspect her Mural with Sabine Cotte, above, who will be restoring the image on Mirka’s behalf. The wall was damaged when a person with very sharp ears ran past at about 100km an hour, a futurist I believe, enamored by destruction. This is an artist's impression of the culptrit.

That art gallery where my erotic education began is closed now. The bookstore below is a Pharmcy , where the light has that mysterious quality that always makes one feel as if they are about to be experimented on. Sometimes I look behind the mouthwash shelves, for a book which might have fallen down, years ago, or a left over bottle of wine. Sometimes it is good to wake up the dead Gods.

No one has any time to read the great novels anymore. This is because we’re too busy updating our profiles on Facebook and looking at the photos of everyone we went to school with who have since become D.J.'s. Many of these people have managed to feign a kind of anonymity by adding the suffix “raw” to their name, so that Brian for example becomes DJ BRIANRAW! In any event, it takes a lot of time to appreciate these things and, unless we finally submit our bodies to medical experiments or come down with swine flu, (both of which would require long periods of quarantine) we’re really not going to be settling down with Proust anytime soon. So in the spirit of the hastily-thrown-together-gift-book-spin-off-based-on-a-real-book-slash-author-that-you’re-probably-never-going-to-read, I am here proposing something which the marketers would probably call The Book of Last Lines, a compilation of endings specifically tailored to those who enjoy saying things like: " Ahh, I just finished War and Peace today tomorrow perhaps I will finish Ulysses!" but don't have the time to mean it.

There have been plenty of compilations chronicling the best opening sentences of all time. In The American Book Review’s top 100, published a couple years ago, Herman Melville, unsurprisingly brought home the whale bacon at #1 with: Call me Ishmael. – from Moby-Dick (1851). There’s a distinct pleasure I think, in finishing a great book and turning, automatically once more to the first line. Not to begin to read the book again in its entirety, but rather to savour now, with hindsight, with nostalgia and longing, that moment, an indiscernible time ago, when we read those first lines for the first time. The pleasure such lines gives us is inseparable of course, from the novel that follows, or at least from the idea of that novel, which we have gradually accumulated even without having read it.

Last lines are different. They are heavier, sadder and more telling I think, not of the novel so much, but of the author. If you want to know who an author is, read their last lines.

Over the last year or so, someone very dear to my heart has been trying to convince me to read Ayn Rand. Now, I have the slight suspicion that Ayn Rand is a fascist. Tobias Wolff described his brief encounter with her in his wonderful little book Old School and this went a long way in confirming my suspicion, ( the fact that her two favourite books were her own, was fairly compelling evidence). But I needed to be sure, so I turned to the last page of her brick sized manifesto, Atlas Shrugged…

Ah, What Titan could stand against such a deeply horrible last line I wondered?

And so here, I put the great (giant) books to battle, last line for last line. Don’t worry, you won’t remember this. At worst, you’ll come to the end of a thousand pages one day in the distant future and have a lingering, even comforting sense of déjà vu, which you will attribute to the greatness of the literature, to the fact that it’s understood the human condition so well. For those of you who object, nevertheless to the practice of ruining secrets, I’ll tell you my pin number. It’s 7642.

Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand) - Page 1168: He raised his hand and over the desolate earth he traced in space the sign of the dollar.

Infinite Jest (David Foster Wallace) - Page 991: And when he came back to, he was flat on his back on the beach in the freezing sand, and it was raining out of a low sky, and the tide was way out.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (Haruki Murakami) - Page 607: In a place far away from anyone or anywhere, I drifted off for a moment.

The Magic Mountain (Thomas Mann) - Page 854: And out of this world wide festival of death, this ugly rotting fever that inflames the rainy evening sky all round – will somebody rise up out of this too?

War and Peace (Leo Tolstoy) - Page 1125: “No, no, it has to be so…right, Marie? It has to be so…”

The Kindly Ones (Jonathan Littell) - Page 975: The kindly ones were onto me.

The Vivisector (Patrick White) - Page 617: Too tired too end-less obvi indi-ggoddd

Underworld (Don Delillo) - Page 827: Peace.

There are forty possible afterlives and David Eagleman has been there and back enough times to tell us what they are. In Sum (Forty tales from the afterlife), his first book, we visit each briefly, and the result is an addictive little gem of thoughtfulness, humour, poetry and paradox, reminiscent of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, (though less pithy, and marred, only occasionally, by a kind of colloquial casualness that seems unsuitable to the theme).

One of the most inspired pieces, Metamorphosis begins like this:

There are three deaths. The first is when the body ceases to function. The second is when the body is consigned to the grave. The Third is that moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time.

In this version of events, we (the dead) find ourselves, in an infinite waiting room, not dissimilar to an airport and lit too brightly by fluorescent beams. We talk and eat biscuits and get used to the dreary wakefulness. At regular intervals, the name of one amongst those waiting will be broadcast over the loudspeakers “to indicate that there will never again be another remembrance of him by anyone on the earth.” Only once you have been well and truly forgotten will you be admitted to the next place, about which nothing can be told.

Needless to say, there are many amongst the waiting who resent the infamy of their earthly identity, which keeps them trapped in this lobby indefinitely. Particular amongst these are the ones who feel falsely remembered, whose enduring fame has stripped all reality from their name such as “the grey haired man at the vending machine who was lionized as a war hero, then demonized as a warlord then finally canonized as a necessary firebrand between two moments in history. He waits with aching heart for his statues to fall.” And though Eagleman doesn’t mention him there’s a long haired man shifting uncomfortably in a chair, and trying to get comfortable in anticipation of a very long wait. His name is David Foster Wallace.

David Foster Wallace, the much admired author and journalist and notorious footnoter, who killed himself in September last year is being remembered, indeed mythologised, in ways, which I would suggest are veering dangerously toward the cynical. Chief amongst these excesses is the publication (re-publication that is, since The Guardian has already published it), in hardback, of a speech he gave in 2005, This is Water. Firstly, it’s a great speech, mostly for the fact that it’s so ordinary. And although it's slow to start, a fact exasperatingly magnified by this recent edition, it builds slowly toward a startling and unexpected climax that is real enough to make it recommended reading for pretty much the entire population of the Western World, or at least those of us who have cars.

The problem, the biggest problem, is the publishers pretentious decision to isolate each sentence on its own page as if this were some sort of Delphic prophecy. Apart from anything else you get sick of turning the pages so often. Also, hardly any of these sentences sound like aphorisms, no matter how hard you try and ponder them as if they were. Their effect is cumulative; because that’s how they were intended to work, as part of an essay.

And then of course, there’s the irony, a mode of disingenuousness against which Foster Wallace himself railed and upon which this publication trades. The irony that is, of publishing a speech by an author who suicided at the age of 46, which addresses explicitly the job of “making it to 30, or maybe 50, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head.”

And so, David Foster Wallace has become, in death, a self help guru and you can take your little prepackaged doses of him, after pilates perhaps, but not all at once.

And that is the curse of this room: end’s Eagleman's Metamorphosis: since we live in the heads of those who remember us, we lose control of our lives and become who they want us to be.