There's extreme violence, extreme sports, extreme weather and extreme snacks. Extreme is the kind of fun you have at the movies, watching actors pretend to die in barrages of destruction, an Extreme Popcorn Mountain Dew Twix Combo in your lap. These days, spectacle is expected and extreme is code for big and bland. An inspection of recent offerings to the Marginalia mailbox suggests that if anything can still shock and entrance us, it is the tiny details that get lost in the big picture.

Fidget is the latest offering from Toronto's Coach House Books (107 pp., $16.95). In it, New York artist Kenneth Goldsmith records every move his body makes on June 16, 1997 (Bloomsday). Don't make fun. It's a harder project than you might imagine. What starts off as "Eyelids open. Tongue runs across upper lip moving from left side of mouth to right following part of lip. Swallow," degenerates into, "New stun wooing me to the giving forget the eyes. And the eyes from whence I came. Eyes right Hudson. Teeth swallow," after Goldsmith, driven half-mad attempting to speak his every sensory experience into a tape-deck, consumes a fifth of Jack Daniel's. You can appreciate this book for its idiocy, its bravado, or its genius. But what it shows is how entirely uncomfortable we are within the shell of our bodies. Extreme are the fidgets and fusses Goldsmith forces us to notice.

Fidget succeeds by making the ordinary extraordinary. Radical U.S. publisher Loompanics' Secrets of Methamphetamine Manufacture, Revised and Expanded 5th Edition (183 pp., $30 US) does the opposite. Wanna synthesize your own speed? Author "Uncle Fester" tells you how in painstaking detail. This is a serious textbook with chapters pithily titled "Last Resort -- Extracting 1-methamphetamine from Vicks' Inhalers." What makes Secrets interesting to those of us not setting out to provide speckled doves to doe-eyed rave brats is its capacity to turn the surreally illegal into simply rendered facts. Fester tells you how to manufacture drugs and avoid being arrested in the process. His tone is matter-of-fact, his settings are kitchens and garages and finished basements. His simple "how to" narrative makes for a far more "extreme" aesthetic experience than rereading The Basketball Diaries.

Still on the subject of drugs, Mississauga, Ont., zine Jook Sing Mui is the repository of Tiffany's detailed descriptions of her life as teenie raver. The first two issues find the wide-eyed high-schooler cataloguing the excruciatingly embarrassing details of her relatively innocent nights out. Tiffany drops her wallet into a skunky toilet. She asks some guy she just met if he is a virgin, then regrets her question. "The last thing I want," she writes, "is my first kiss to be at a rave, by someone I don't know, while I am high on Ecstasy." Lost in the jungles of adolescence, Tiffany clings to the minutiae that comprise the strictures of normalcy.

Finally, we turn to the work of maverick Ottawa chapbook scribbler "Black Conrad." His recently published short fiction lampoon is entitled Working in the Bowels of Hell and chronicles a hapless journalist whose newsroom boss has an anus for a face. Our journalist hero exults in the details: "And a huge anus it is -- a protruding pink hole where his eyes, nose and lips used to be." The editor uses his unique physiognomy to defecate on any story he deems not sensational enough. The whole thing is a jovially over-the-top parody that relies on juxtaposing the editor's preference for shocking news bits and gory photos with the juvenile details of the editor's bowel movements. They give us pause, but we barely notice the extreme panorama of wrecks, murders and disasters in the background. We take it in our stride.