February 2012
2 posts
Hogs Wild →
by Ian Frazier (stolen from TETW)
What do wild hogs do that’s so bad?
Oh, not much… eat red-cheeked salamanders and short-tailed shrews and red-back voles and other dwellers in the leaf litter in the Great Smoky Mountains, and destroy a yard that had previously won two “‘Yard of the Month” awards on Robins Air Force Base, in central Georgia, and knock...
A Fair to Remember →
Dave Hickey on Art Fairs
We ride downtown in a white stretch limo with yellow lights on the sides. Everyone in front of the Mandarin is disappointed when we step out. They were expecting P. Diddy, at least. To reach the Sotheby’s party, we must trudge down a Great Wall of Chinese post-modernism. When we are finally seated on our white leather poufs, we decide that Sotheby’s can lay claim...
January 2012
8 posts
Donald Barthelme's Syllabus →
by Kevin Moffett
There was a time when I fought against an impatience with reading, concealing, with partisanship, the fissures in my education. I confused difficulty with duplicity, and that which didn’t come easily, I often scorned. Then, in my last year of college in Gainesville, Florida, I was given secondhand a list of eighty-one books, the recommendations of Donald Barthelme to his...
Donald Barthelme's Reading List
A reading list of 81 Books, chosen by the father of post-modern fiction
Flann O’Brien, At Swim Two-Birds
Flann O’Brien, The Third Policeman
Isaac Babel, Collected Short Stories
Borges, Labyrinths
Borges, Other Inquisitions
Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
Thomas Bernhard, Correction
Rudy Wurlitzer, Nog
Isaac B Singer, Gimpel the Fool
Bernard Malamud, The Assistant
...
When John Waters Met Little Richard →
I bring up the book – The Life and Times of Little Richard, perhaps the best and most shocking celebrity tell-all book ever written. Penned by Charles White with Little Richard’s full co-operation and published in 1984, it is copyrighted in the names of the author, the star and his longtime, now-deceased manager, Robert “Bumps” Blackwell. It’s a real lulu. Detailing his early life, in which he...
Je M’Accuse →
Fiona Maazel on Internet Confessionals
The Internet is a compendium of broken and distorted souls: the blogs, journals, webcams, personal ads. Out there, self-exposure is no longer a niche activity, but a preoccupation that’s slowly colonizing the Internet, site by site. Let’s start with a text I recently saw online: 942422998 I tricked a good friend into betraying me so that I would have...
2 tags
How Sassy (Should Have) Changed My Life →
by Caralene Bauer
If you subscribed to or even occasionally read Sassy, the teen-girl magazine that existed from 1989 to 1996, then that makes you, approximately, a pro-choice registered Democrat who came of age listening to alternative rock. You grew up on R.E.M., the Smiths, the Cure, Throwing Muses, Sonic Youth, Liz Phair, Hole, Bikini Kill, PJ Harvey, My So-Called Life, and John Hughes....
On Utopia →
by Paul La Farge,
More than a few years ago now, when I was living in San Francisco, I happened to walk by the office of a dot-com, a competitor in the online-pet-supply business, that had gone bust. It was midnight when I passed its brilliantly lit atrium, void of humans and furniture, except for a single desk where a night watchman sat looking dejectedly at the street. A huge white banner hung...
Feet in Smoke →
by John Jeremiah Sullivan,
On the morning of April 21, 1995, my elder brother, Worth (short for Elsworth), put his mouth to a microphone in a garage in Lexington, Kentucky, and was—in the strict sense of having been “shocked to death”—electrocuted. He and his band, the Moviegoers, had stopped for a day to rehearse on their way from Chicago to a concert in Tennessee, where I was in school...
When I Look at a Strawberry, I Think of a Tongue →
by Édouard Levé,
When I was young, I thought Life: A User’s Manual would teach me how to live and Suicide: A User’s Manual how to die. I don’t really listen to what people tell me. I forget things I don’t like. I look down dead-end streets. The end of a trip leaves me with a sad aftertaste the same as the end of a novel. I am not afraid of what comes at the end of life. I am slow to realize when...
December 2011
6 posts
A Festive Message from Paul La Farge
To celebrate the nexus of three religious holidays – Channukah (חנוכה), Christmas and Kwanzaa – we’ve decided to throw open the gates and cede creative control to one Paul La Farge, author of several novels including the brilliant and modem-meltingly modern Luminous Airplanes (buy it please) and many excellent essays. (I recommend Destroy all Monsters, on the murky world of Dungeons and...
Meltdown →
Wells Tower travels Greenland with his Father
In the Inuit village of Tasiilaq, on Greenland’s east coast, in a bar whose name, as far as I can tell, is Bar, people are enjoying themselves as though the world will end tomorrow.
There are maybe 30 folks in here, few of them women, nearly all of them catastrophically drunk. Two men who look fresh from a seal hunt are locked in a dance that...
The American Male Age Ten →
by Susan Orlean,
If Colin Duffy and I were to get married, we would have matching superhero notebooks. We would ’ wear shorts, big sneakers, and long, baggy T shirts depicting famous athletes every single day, even in the winter. We would sleep in our clothes. We would both be good at Nintendo Street Fighter II, but Colin would be better than me. We would have some homework, but it would not...
Shipping Out – On The (Nearly Lethal) Comforts Of... →
A blast from the past by David Foster Wallace,
I have now seen sucrose beaches and water a very bright blue. I have seen an all-red leisure suit with flared lapels. I have smelled suntan lotion spread over 2,100 pounds of hor flesh. I have been addressed as “Man” in three different nations. I have seen 500 upscale Americans dance the Electric Slide. I have seen sunsets that looked...
1 tag
A Baby Wolf With Neon Bones - Nick Tosches... →
Penthouse: Were you a horny teenager, Patti?
Smith: Yeah, I was horny, but I was innocent ‘cause I was a real-late bloomer and not particularly attractive. In fact, homely. See, nobody told me that girls got horny. It was tragic ‘cause I had all these feelings inside me. I was like one of the boys in school who flap their legs frantically under the desk. I always had this weird feeling...
Six to Eight Black Men →
by David Sedaris (via TETW)
In France and Germany, gifts are exchanged on Christmas Eve, while in Holland the children receive presents on December 5, in celebration of Saint Nicholas Day. It sounded sort of quaint until I spoke to a man named Oscar, who filled me in on a few of the details as we walked from my hotel to the Amsterdam train station…
The words silly and unrealistic...
November 2011
4 posts
Sister Act →
DEEP INSIDE THE SECRET LIFE OF SORORITY GIRLS AT OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY with Evan Wright
Heather says she feels “truly blessed” to have been accepted by her sorority. She was intimidated by the size of OSU, and being a sorority sister makes the university feel like a small college.
At the same time, Heather criticizes the cruelty of the rush process, in which some sorority girls rate the...
2 tags
Scenes From My Life in Porn →
by Evan Wright, (via TETW)
In 1996, an unknown named Jasmin St. Claire set out to have sex with 300 men in a XXX video titled The World‘s Biggest Gang-Bang II, thereby breaking an alleged record of 251 men set a year earlier by Annabel Chong. By the mid-’90s, gangbang films had become a hot product in the industry. They not only created overnight stars — worthy of Howard Stern, Jerry...
3 tags
In My Father's Kitchen →
by Chris Wallace
I used to joke that I have daddy issues with Jacques Pépin, because it was he who really raised me. My parents divorced when I was a year old and, until I was thirteen, they split custody in every conceivable way. It was my father’s habit to write in the mornings and watch his favorite cooking shows in the afternoon, with a drink, while preparing dinner. On the days I was...
6 tags
Real Genius →
By Chuck Klosterman, (link fixed)
Once in a while, everything about the world changes at once. This is one of those times.
Consider everything you think you know about music. Consider all that you believe to be “good” and all that you believe to be “bad.” Consider the manner in which you view popular culture. And now—today—cast all those thoughts aside....
October 2011
2 posts
7 tags
The Non-Scenic Route to the Place We’re Going... →
by John Lanchester
Quarterly GDP data don’t, on the whole, tend to make the person studying them laugh out loud. The most recent set, however, are an exception, despite the fact that the general picture is of unrelieved and spreading economic gloom. Instead of the surge of rebounding growth which historically accompanies successful exit from a recession, we have the UK’s disappointing 0.2...
2 tags
Novelty Acts →
The Sexual Revolutions Before the Sexual Revolution, by Ariel Levy
In the past century—as feminists discovered the clitoris, gay liberationists discovered homosexuality, and flower children discovered free love—the illusion of erotic novelty entered mass culture. Dr. Alex Comfort, the author of the international best-seller “The Joy of Sex,” first published in 1972, was convinced that...
September 2011
5 posts
5 tags
Signifying Rappers →
An excerpt from David Foster Wallace now priceless 1990 book on Hip Hop culture, Signifying Rappers
Rjam Productions, modestly headquartered in a mixed black/Hispanic Field, Corner section of North Dorchester, is as follows:
* One (1) four-car garage fitted with dubbing and remastering gear worth more than most of the rest of the real estate on the block; * One (1) touch-tone telephone...
The Idiot Culture →
Carl Bernstein on Watergate and journalism,
Despite some of the mythology that has come to surround “investigative” journalism, it is important to remember what we did and did not do in Watergate. For what we did was not, in truth, very exotic. Our actual work in uncovering the Watergate story was rooted in the most basic kind of empirical police reporting. We relied more on shoe...
Pink →
by David Byrne
“I adore that pink! It’s the navy blue of India,” declared Diana Vreeland, former editor of Vogue and source of many aphorisms. By this she meant that, just as navy blue in our culture tends to signify conservative respectability, pink exemplifies tradition and balance in India. The existence of universal stylistic and psychological color reactions is...
Mauve →
by Shelley Jackson
Contusions and confusions. Half-mourning and melancholia. Twilight and adolescence, home decorators and homosexuals. Drag queen hair, cheap swag, braggadocio. Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley (that “monstrous orchid,” said Wilde). Orchids, especially Cattleya labiata. All things orchidaceous, including the word “orchidaceous.” Prose just shy of purple. According to...
1 tag
The View From Mrs Thompson's →
David Foster Wallace on 9/11
Everybody was staring in transfixed horror at one of the very few pieces of video CBS never reran, which was a distant wide-angle shot of the North Tower and its top floors’ exposed steel lattice in flames and of dots detaching from the building and moving through smoke down the screen, which then that jerky tightening of the shot revealed to be actual people...
August 2011
13 posts
Liking Is for Cowards. Go for What Hurts. →
by Jonathan Franzen,
A COUPLE of weeks ago, I replaced my three-year-old BlackBerry Pearl with a much more powerful BlackBerry Bold. Needless to say, I was impressed with how far the technology had advanced in three years. Even when I didn’t have anybody to call or text or e-mail, I wanted to keep fondling my new Bold and experiencing the marvelous clarity of its screen, the silky action...
3 tags
STOP →
An elegy for the telegram, by Ander Monson (link now fixed)
There are still a few telegram services you can find on the Internet, but the Internet itself of course is one of the successors of the telegram, itself a successor to the dot-dot-dash of the telegraph (like the enduring telephone, TYMNET, Telenet, and other data networks, faxes, videoconferencing, IMing, text-messaging, and...
3 tags
Shoplifters of the World Unite →
Slavoj Žižek’s (inevitable) essay on the London riots.
Although the riots in the UK were triggered by the suspicious shooting of Mark Duggan, everyone agrees that they express a deeper unease – but of what kind? As with the car burnings in the Paris banlieues in 2005, the UK rioters had no message to deliver. (There is a clear contrast with the massive student demonstrations in...
3 tags
Erotics of the Mining City →
by Edwin Dobb
To orient. Most of us are animated by what might be called the cosmological impulse—a reflexive tendency to orient ourselves with respect to space and time. It’s so deep-seated that we usually don’t think about it. On a mundane level, the impulse manifests itself in a variety of ways, depending on circumstance. In cities such as New York, where I lived for ten years before moving...
Gods and Monsters →
Paul La Farge on HP Lovecraft
A story from the vault: When we were 11 years old, my best friend and I used to don black robes and wander the streets of the Upper West Side in the middle of the night, carrying signs that read, on one side, The End of the World Is Nigh, and, on the other, Give to the Cult of Cthulhu. What nameless dread, what eldritch excitation, drove us to risk mugging or...
Cannery Woe →
by Wells Tower
BETWEEN JOBS A FEW YEARS BACK, I decided to work in a southwest Alaskan cannery in Dillingham, which is not so much a town as an open-air boat garage by a tent city near Bristol Bay. Shifts ran 16 hours, 24/7. I had not been on the slime line five minutes that day, my fifth, when I was pelted in the throat with a salmon heart. It lay near my boot—a fleshy, violet organ the...
1 tag
The Blazing Light in August →
Gabriel Gbadamosi on London’s riots
I’ve woken up in a riot – inside a London phone box. A brick has just smashed into the glass. There are four of us squashed in to get out of the rain of bottles and stones. I can’t get my arm up to protect my face, we’re all trying to crouch down, I can feel glass fall on my hair. But I’ve got a thick, springy Afro and I can still shake it. My...
3 tags
Harvard and Class →
by Misha Glouberman and Sheila Heti,
I grew up in Montreal and went to an upper-middle-class Jewish day school where kids had parents who maybe owned a carpet store or maybe were dentists. And then I went to Harvard for college. And it was pretty weird.
When I applied, I thought it would be great because I would get to meet lots of smart people. Those were the kinds of people I liked to be...
1 tag
A Kiss Is Still a Kiss (even if the sex is... →
by Edwin Dobb
Surgeon Rear Admiral C. M. Beadnell has written that the mouth kiss “probably evolved by gradual stages from the apposition of face to face which constitutes the kiss among primitive races.” Beadnell’s use of the word “primitive,” implying here an indefensible cultural chauvinism, makes one wince, but the overall point is well considered, as are most...
1 tag
The Days and Knights of Tom Murphy →
Wells Tower on Tom Murphy, outdoor chess champion
For a mere $5, I learned from Murphy that the entire tortuous body of the game’s strategy is neatly reducible to three clean principles.
“Number one, king safety” — above all else protect your king. “Number two, control the center” — i.e., maintain influence over the board’s four center...
2 tags
Unknown Bards: The blues becomes transparent about... →
by John Jeremiah Sullivan
Late in 1998 or early in ’99—during the winter that straddled the two—I spent a night on and off the telephone with a person named John Fahey. I was a junior editor at the Oxford American magazine, which at that time had its offices in Oxford, Mississippi; Fahey, then almost sixty and living in Room 5 of a welfare motel outside Portland, Oregon, was himself,...
1 tag
The Fickle Needle of Fate →
by Paul Collins,
You’re working in the parts department of a Plymouth dealership, car demo disc in your hand, campaign coverage of Nixon and Kennedy chattering away from another car in the garage.
And you’re wondering: Who the hell puts a turntable in a car’s dashboard?
Five years earlier, the verdict of Peter Goldmark’s son had been pitiless: “Boring.”
The radio in the Goldmark family’s...
July 2011
9 posts
In the Jungle →
by Rian Malan
Once upon a time, a long time ago, a small miracle took place in the brain of a man named Solomon Linda. It was 1939, and he was standing in front of a microphone in the only recording studio in black Africa when it happened. He hadn’t composed the melody or written it down or anything. He just opened his mouth and out it came, a haunting skein of fifteen notes that flowed down...
Cream of The Crap →
by Mark Blackwell,
It started quite innocently, with a contest under the headline “Do You Suck?”: “So you and some other losers got together and tried to start a band? None of you can play your instruments, carry a tune, or write a decent song even if your lives depend upon it? … Well, congratulations! You win!” The constant barrage of material from pathetic...
3 tags
Pleasures of the Fur →
by George Gurley
A moose is loitering outside a hotel in the Chicago suburb of Arlington Heights. The moose—actually a man in a full-body moose costume—is here for a convention … and so is the porcupine a few feet away, as well as the many foxes and wolves.
Even the people in regular clothes have a little something (ferret hand puppet, rabbit ears) to set them apart from the ordinary hotel...
4 tags
Tania's World →
Howard Kohn and David Weir on Patty Hearst,
Patty Hearst and Emily Harris waited on a grimy Los Angeles street, fighting their emotions as they listened to a radio rebroadcasting the sounds of their friends dying. On a nearby corner Bill Harris dickered over the price of a battered old car.
Only blocks away, rifle cartridges were exploding in the dying flames of a charred bungalow. The...
2 tags
The String Theory →
by David Foster Wallace
What happens when all of a man’s intelligence and athleticism is focused on placing a fuzzy yellow ball where his opponent is not? An obsessive inquiry (with footnotes), into the physics and metaphysics of tennis.
When Michael T. Joyce of Los Angeles serves, when he tosses the ball and his face rises to track it, it looks like he’s smiling, but he’s not really...
2 tags
The Burden of Home →
by Aaron Gilbreath
Sometime in fifth grade, just before North Shore came out, I bought a bodyboard and learned to ride waves pretty well. At home, I covered my bedroom walls with images clipped from surf magazines: black sand and palm groves; bronze women in bikinis splashing through azure water. I stuck surf stickers on my door, corny ones that said Body Glove and Mr. Zog’s Sex Wax in...
5 tags
The Thing With Feathers →
by Wells Tower
IF YOU WERE THE LAST BIRD OF YOUR SPECIES, looking for a comfortable place to evade extinction, the view flying over northern Monroe County, Arkansas, would probably not tempt you to touch down. You’d see abandoned trailer homes with saplings growing through their windows; asbestos-shingle shacks with discarded cars and appliances sinking into their lawns; rice fields...
2 tags
House for Sale →
By Jonathan Franzen, via TETW.
I adore this essay, which appears in Franzen essay-collection-cum-memoir The Discomfort Zone.
My mother’s house, in Webster Groves, was dark except for a lamp on a timer in the living room. Letting myself inside, I went directly to the liquor shelf and poured the hammer of a drink I’d been promising myself since before the first of my two flights. I had a ...
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June 2011
31 posts
4 tags
Balanced Diets →
by Daniel Mason
The purposeful ingestion of things not typically considered food is known today as pica, after the Latin word for magpie, a bird once held to have promiscuous tastes. It is a term of shifting boundaries. Some have used it to describe any indiscriminate eating, from the scavenging seen in some forms of mental illness to the calculated consumption of a Cessna 150 by French...