In the current issue of Tin House Robin Romm has a very compelling essay on the value of mean-spirited judgement in our novels, especially as empathy becomes reified into fiction’s greatest gift and virtue, or even treated as a therapeutic offering.
Mean Reading
Medi Marijuana Reduces Fatalities
Okay, let’s just admit that this is an interesting piece of cultural news: a new study has shown that legalizing medical marijuana sales in various states over the last two decades has led to a nearly 10 percent drop in traffic fatalities.
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Did You Say Sudoku
“Tsundoku: the acquiring of reading materials followed by letting them pile up and subsequently never reading them.” Do you buy books and let them languish? According to Ozy, there’s a Japanese word for that. Might we encourage your tsundoku habit by encouraging you to look at this list of our favorite October releases?
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Believe Me
There’s a certain narrative voice with an unspoken aim to exonerate the speaker from wrongdoing. It occurs in novels, though it’s most common in monologues, especially those which take up the entirety of a play. At Bookforum, Lurid and Cute author Adam Thirlwell lists a number of examples, including Hunger by Knut Hamsun and Wars I Have Seen by Gertrude Stein.
He Is Not Pynchon
Penguin released a book trailer for the newest Thomas Pynchon novel in which a guy in a T-shirt that reads “I’m Pynchon” stands on a rooftop on the “Yupper” West Side and talks about his life. (To find out why I used the term “Yupper,” check out the recent New York mag piece on Pynchon that I wrote about last week.)
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“We call it Book”
Old but still as timely as ever: The latest and greatest in cutting-edge reading technology from Penny Arcade.
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How to Beat Bias Againist the News? Libraries
Lisa Eve Cheby argues that one of the best ways to beat ‘fake news’ claims (which is really media illiteracy) is to fund more libraries. Read the rest of her argument in Entropy. I’m certainly convinced.
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Meeting the Locals
If you’re like me, you probably assumed you’d never read the phrase “George Saunders in O, the Oprah Magazine”, but this is where his latest piece has turned up. As part of a creative way of presenting a list of books to read, the author imagines what reading material he’d give to an alien who wants to know what it’s like to be human. For more on his work, go read our own Elizabeth Minkel on his legacy and recent collection.
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Much of the “empathy” in modern fiction (and the old stuff, come to think of it) is just sentimentality dressed up in pretty prose.