Michele Filgate was so terrified by Dave Eggers’s The Circle that she quit social media for a week and wrote about the experience for Salon. “I don’t want to become like Mae, sacrificing real-life friendships for the allure of the screen. I want to be aware of the world around me. I want to write about that world. I want to feel more alive, even if that means being lonelier in the process.” Pair with: our review of the novel.
Vicious Circle
Still I Rise
Maya Angelou reciting "Still I Rise"--in case you're feeling be-Job-ed today and need of the consolation of literature or if you have doubts about the existence of true poetry in the present age. (Printed text of the poem is here.)
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Don’t Just Stand There
Choire Sicha discusses the use of the phrase “from the sidelines.” (h/t The Awl)
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Football Book Club: Bye Week
It's bye week over at Football Book Club. And while there's no new book to read this week -- everybody's resting up, licking their wounds, and sticking pins in Jay Cutler voodoo dolls -- you, gentle reader, should be sure to check in for new posts on Louisa Hall's Speak -- and Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts.
PEN/Faulkner Fiction Finalists Announced
Five finalists have been named for this year’s PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction: Daniel Alarcón’s At Night We Walk in Circles, Percival Everett’s Percival Everett by Virgil Russell, Karen Joy Fowler’s We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, (Year in Reading alum) Joan Silber’s Fools, and Valerie Trueblood’s Search Party: Stories of Rescue. One winner will be selected on April 2, 2014, and a celebratory dinner will be held in its honor on May 10. You can read up on all of the finalists over here.
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The Help: Feel-Good or Offensive?
Though it had a promising box office debut, The Help is ruffling some feathers for its portrayal of African American women. Roxane Gay sums things up nicely for The Rumpus.
Here is Filgate’s epiphany: “It’s better to find a balance and not think of your life as existing in 140 characters or status updates.”
Did she really need Dave Eggers to tell her that?
All of these practically religious reactions to what seems to me to be the least subtle, least profound book of the year make me feel, as someone who doesn’t use much social media, that I’ve drastically, devastatingly underestimated how much it dominates other people’s lives.
Seriously, has no one that uses social media ever considered that maybe spending five hours every day on Facebook and Twitter isn’t particularly healthy or productive?