“I don’t know anymore where I begin and Obama ends.” Go and check out this fascinating profile of Ben Rhodes, the “Boy Wonder of the Obama Whitehouse,” who dropped out of his second year at NYU’s M.F.A. program after witnessing the attacks on September 11th to take up a life of international affairs and foreign policy. When asked about whom he would choose write the story of his work life, Rhodes picked novelist Don DeLillo: “He is the only person I can think of who has confronted these questions of, you know, the individual who finds himself negotiating both vast currents of history and a very specific kind of power dynamics. That’s his milieu. And that’s what it’s like to work in the U.S. foreign-policy apparatus in 2016.”
Using a Writer’s Tools
You Are What You Buy
This piece by Carrie Murphy is delightful and playful and a couple other “adjective”+fuls all in one.
The Perils of Book Lending
We’ve all been there, right? Your neighbor lends you a book, you don’t treat it very carefully, she complains, so you thrust a samurai sword inches from her face. It happens.
Oxford Marginalia Group
Recommended reading: Lauren Collins writes for The New Yorker about the Oxford University Marginalia group and the fate of bookish scribblings.
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On the Road with Hurston and Hughes
Yuval Taylor tells the story of a fortuitous road trip, on which Zora Neale Hurston drove Langston Hughes from Mobile to Tuskegee.
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Smart Money
Colson Whitehead will be playing in next month’s World Series of Poker. He’s writing about it for Grantland, Bill Simmons‘ new ESPN affiliate. He’s also accepting sponsorships.
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Last words
Japanese director Satoshi Kon died last Tuesday at the age of 46. His last words, a rambling text that his family uploaded to the Internet following his death, have just been translated to English: “Everyone, thank you for all the truly great memories. I loved the world I lived in.”
Tools like this don’t deserve a DeLillo. They deserve a Clancy. Your life isn’t that interesting, dude.
Amen, brother. Plus: I sort of hate it when mainstream political propaganda sneaks its way into Lit Chat. Tools of that ilk should just collect their pay-checks and stop wanting to be admired on top of it.
“And that’s what it’s like to work in the U.S. foreign-policy apparatus in 2016.”
You mean at the spotless end of the blood-letting juggernaut?