“People used to wish that life could be as it is in books—that it could have the beauty, drama, and shapeliness that writers gave it. Today, by contrast, we hope desperately that life is not really like our writers portray it; in other words, we hope that writers are not representative men and women, but unfit beings whose perceptions are filtered through their unhealth. It is necessary to hope this, because if life were as it appears in our literature it would be unlivable.” Adam Kirsch explores the downside of literary nostalgia.
It Isn’t Even Past
“Fat guy. They knew.”
Recommended Reading: Ray Shea's essay at Hobart "Fat Guy." "I want to say that I shrunk into my shoes and disappeared, but when somebody throws 'fat guy' at you, you don't shrink, you grow. You bloat."
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The Blog Post That Has No Name
"She was furious about the way the female college students of the next generation had been programmed to regard getting an MRS. degree as the be-all and end-all of their experience in higher education. She was enraged by the way the psychiatric profession regarded housewives’ unhappiness as a symptom of an out-of-whack libido. She was angry at the way the economy appeared to see her entire sex as simple consumption machines who built national prosperity by buying new appliances for the kitchen and searching madly for the perfect laundry detergent." Betty Friedan's second wave classic The Feminine Mystique turns fifty.
Open City Closes
Open City, a showcase for edgy writing for the past 20 years, is closing down due to the withdrawal of several sources of funding. "These things are not institutions," founder and co-editor Thomas Beller tells the New York Observer.
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Born Weird
Meet the man who calls his own fans "scum," R. Crumb. Crumb first rose to prominence after the 1968 debut of Zap Comix, the first of the majorly successful "underground comix" publications. His work with legendary poet Charles Bukowski is worth taking a look.
I Mean, Why Not?
Two minutes of gorgeous West Indian manatee footage, and you'd better believe I'm linking to it.
“I guess you could call this ‘fake livetweeting’.”
The latest installment in The Believer’s “What Would Twitter Do?” series (which we’ve mentioned before) features London Review of Books editor Christian Lorentzen, whose Twitter feed, Sheila Heti writes, “seem[s] like what someone who only expresse[s] himself as a fiction writer within the universe of twitter might come up with.” Meanwhile, Heti has a review of The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. by Adelle Waldman in (where else?) the LRB.
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