May 2013
1 post
The Internet is Dead. Hope You Got the Memo.... →
Don’t worry too much. Magazines are a lot like blogs. They’re full of words and pictures. You have to pay for them (which feels bad) but they’re made of paper (which feels good).
Our first issue features writing from Geoff Dyer, Jonathan Meades, Sam Lipsyte, Jacob Blandy. Also included, Coolio, GZA, Margot Henderson, Jacob Holdt, Thomas Bayrle and millions more. It’s...
February 2013
2 posts
Leaving Reality →
John Jeremiah Sullivan on The Real World
They’re all there, all the old American grotesques, the test-tube babies of Whitman and Poe, a great gauntlet of doubtless eyes, big mouths spewing fantastic catchphrase fountains of impenetrable self-justification, muttering dark prayers, calling on God to strike down those who would fuck with their money, their cash, and always knowing, always...
The Old Man at Burning Man →
Wells Tower takes his Dad to Burning Man. (This is bliss.)
We pick a campsite in a quiet neighborhood on an outer ring of the city. To one side of us, some rather abject fraternity gentlemen cower in the lee of their Subaru having Heineken brews. Our closest neighbors are several women in their thirties whom James Dean promptly diagnoses as “horny” by means of divination lost on the...
December 2012
1 post
Netherland →
Rachel Aviv follows a young, gay woman living on the streets of NY,
In a purple spiral-bound notebook, she created a guide for life on the streets. She listed the locations of soup kitchens, public libraries, bottle-return vending machines, thrift stores, and public sports clubs, where she could slip in for free showers. Under the heading “known homeless encampments,” she wrote down all the...
November 2012
2 posts
Light Entertainment →
Andrew O’Hagan writes about child abuse, the BBC and the British public
It was a time of Player’s cigarettes and gin after hours at the pubs on Great Portland Street. Broadcasting House was a maze of stairwells, long corridors and unknown powers, a world within worlds that couldn’t quite decide whether it was a branch of the civil service or a theatrical den. Many of the men who worked there...
Does Mitt Romney Have a Soul? →
By Wells Tower
About eight months ago, I was tasked with an assignment: Starting in South Carolina, I would follow Governor Mitt “Tin Man” Romney on the long trail, from winter to summer of his life’s most important year. My job was to get as close to the candidate as possible on a mission of the spirit: to search for signs of genuine life, to spy out those remnants...
October 2012
4 posts
Caution: These Kids Are About to Blow Up →
Two years after Nancy Jo Sales profiled the “Prep-School Gangsters” selling drugs to NYs finest, she tracked down those same kids. Most of them, she found, had been dating Liv Tyler or pitching Puffy movie scripts. They all went on to own new-media companies. Total nightmares. Cross yourself: this is about to get hellish.
Shawn sits beside Heather at a Mac 8100; they’re...
Prep-School Gangsters →
Nancy Jo Sales on rich-kids playing gangster in 1996.
“We sell to Dalton, Trinity, Horace Mann, Spence, Chapin, Columbia Prep, mad girls from Brearley” he goes on. “Basically every school you can name.”
A.Z.’s got rolling papers on his legs; he’s fixing up a “cone”, a filtered joint of chronic. They say their “shit is so strong, if...
Online Dating →
by Emily Witt
I wanted a boyfriend. I was also badly hung up on someone and wanted to stop thinking about him. People cheerily list their favourite movies and hope for the best, but darkness simmers beneath the chirpy surface. An extensive accrual of regrets lurks behind even the most well-adjusted profile. I read 19th-century novels to remind myself that sunny equanimity in the aftermath of...
God wielded the buzzer →
Christian Lorentzen reviews Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace by D.T. Max.
Three things: 1) look at the black lab in the pic below, enjoy it 2) I don’t want to be all ‘investing in the canon’ and shiz so this is the last DFW post for a while 3) the biography is a good one and you should buy it.
He was precocious and diligent but also...
September 2012
3 posts
The House that Hova Built →
Disclaimer: unless you live under a rock, you’ve almost certainly read this. Zadie Smith on Jay Z
Asking why rappers always talk about their stuff is like asking why Milton is forever listing the attributes of heavenly armies. Because boasting is a formal condition of the epic form. And those taught that they deserve nothing rightly enjoy it when they succeed in terms the culture...
The Best Night $500,000 Can Buy →
Devin Friedman spends one night at The Marquee, Las Vegas. Hates it.
We watched Benassi. We had Joe take us to the private bathroom (that’s a service he provided, “bathroom walks”) and felt as if we had paid to pretend we were kind of famous. We had our ice changed twice in fifteen minutes. (We were now timing it.) We watched people raising their hands in the air, either in a...
If You Find this World Bad, You Should Try Some of... →
Philip K Dick gets weird on the possibility of alternative realities; if I’m not mistaken, suggests that he may have actually been to a parallel universe. :-/
May I tell you how much I appreciate your asking me to share some of my ideas with you. A novelist carries with him constantly what most women carry in large purses: much that is useless, a few absolutely essential items, and then,...
August 2012
6 posts
The New Mecca →
George Saunders on Dubai, before we properly knew it was an abject exploitative nightmare.
In Which I Fall In Love With A Fake Town
From the air, Dubai looked something like Dallas circa 1985: a vast expanse of one- or two-story white boxes, punctuated by clusters of freakish skyscrapers. (An Indian kid shouted, “Dad, looks like a microchip!”) Driving in from the airport,...
I Can't Believe It's Not Buddha →
The late, great David Rakoff on Steven Seagal’s career as a teacher of Tibettan Buddhism
I will come to know it as the Omega Hug: the official embrace of the Omega Institute of Holistic Studies. The woman in the fringed halter top and wraparound skirt sees someone se knows. Walking across the wide planked veranda—long limbed as a Modigliani, her ankle bracelets of tiny silver bells...
A Rough Guide to Disneyworld →
At the risk of becoming a one-blog PR machine charged only with ensuring the success of John Jeremiah Sullivan, here’s another brilliant essay from JJS. I kind of wanted to leave it a while, but I’m a sucker for these bad-dad stories. So here it is…
The camper containing Shell, Trevor, Flora and Lil’ Dog moved south-southeast from Chattanooga. We were converging like lines on...
Violence of the Lambs →
The greatest threat to civilization in the next half century is not nuclear arms or global warming or a super-resistant virus that will wipe us out by the millions. Essayist-regular John Jeremiah Sullivan contemplates the coming battle between man and beast. Yes, interspecies war.
There are four small English seaport towns, for instance, where various seabirds have started targeting people. A...
The Vietnam Syndrome →
The late, great Christopher Hitchens on Agent Orange and America’s ecocidal war on Vietnam
The very title of our joint subject is, I must tell you, a sick joke to begin with. Perhaps you remember the jaunty names of the callous brutes in Reservoir Dogs: “Mr. Pink,” “Mr. Blue,” and so on? Well, the tradition of giving pretty names to ugly things is as old as...
The Great Taxonomy of Literary Tumblrs →
So we made it into The Millions’ taxonomy of the best literary tumblrs. We’re in fine company alongside N+1, Granta, Guernica and The New York Review of Books, all of which have been featured on these pages. Super proud.
guernicamag:
millionsmillions:
5. Literary, Cultural and Art Magazines or Blogs
Recommended Reading: Home of the marvelous ongoing fiction series run...
July 2012
1 post
Travelling Southwards →
Andrew O’Hagan reviews 50 Shades of Grey
Robbins and Collins liked a plush car with a smooth chassis. They liked champagne and caviar and jets you could shag in. They liked big desks. They liked jacuzzis. But what these gazillion-selling authors liked most was a human being perpetually on the brink of a soaring orgasm. Women just had to be approached, sometimes just looked at, and a...
June 2012
2 posts
The Final Comeback of Axl Rose →
by John Jeremiah Sullivan,
On May 15, he came out in jeans and a black leather jacket and giant black sunglasses, all lens, that made him look like a wasp-man. We had been waiting—I don’t really know how to calculate how long we’d been waiting. It was the third of the four comeback shows in New York, at the Hammerstein Ballroom. The doors had opened at seven o’clock. The...
Feet in Smoke →
To celebrate his forthcoming essay collection, Pulphead, here’s a hardy Essayist perrenial from 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...
May 2012
2 posts
6 tags
Laughing With kafka →
by David Foster Wallace. An essay that is dear to my heart.
For me, a signal frustration in trying to read Kafka with college students is that it is next to impossible to get them to see that Kafka is funny … Nor to appreciate the way funniness is bound up with the extraordinary power of his stories. Because, of course, great short stories and great jokes have a lot in common… I might invite...
1,200 TED Talks →
Q: What’s better than watching a dotcom millionaire repeat the words “dream”, “causality” and “accomplishment” into a bubble-mic?
A: 1,204 dotcom millionaires repeating the words “dream”, “causality” and “accomplishment” into bubble-mics.
Somebody’s collected URLs to (and descriptions of) every TED talk since...
April 2012
2 posts
In Gold We Trust →
When the economy goes to pot, we the people place our faith in one indisputably sexy commodity. It’s the lone bright spot on Wall Street and a rallying cry for the riotous right. So as the Ron Pauls of the world dream of a return to the gold standard, GQ sent Wells Tower to the Klondike, where a new gold rush is on and rumors of a mother lode have everyone acting a little feverish.
Even...
My Kushy New Job →
by Wells Tower
“I would kill to have your job” is a sentiment I’ll hear from tourists by the dozen during my week behind the Dampkring bar, though in fact I anticipate the exercise with cold anxiety. Part of the job, I’ve already been told, will involve smoking weed in quantity, and marijuana and I do not make a happy team. “Paranoia” doesn’t adequately...
March 2012
1 post
How The Daily Mail Conquered England →
by Lauren Collins
The Mail’s editor, Paul Dacre, considers it a compliment when critics accuse the paper of moralizing. “The family is the greatest institution on God’s green earth,” he told me recently, sitting on a dotted-swiss sofa in his London office, which is swagged in the camels and burgundys, the brasses and woods, that one would expect of a man who, as a student at the University of...
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...
