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...
3 tags
Pastoral Romance →
by Brent Cunningham
Betty Jo Patton spent her childhood on a 240-acre farm in Mason County, West Virginia, in the 1930s. Her family raised what it ate, from tomatoes to turkeys, pears to pigs. They picked, plucked, slaughtered, butchered, cured, canned, preserved, and rendered. They drew water from a well, cooked on a wood stove, and the bathroom was an outhouse.
Phoebe Patton Randolph,...
3 tags
In Search of the Fur Bat →
Paul La Farge on Thomas Stanford and the Spiritualists
Stanford University’s Spanish Revival campus sprawls between Palo Alto and the foothills of the coastal mountains like a training center for Taco Bell franchise owners, a gigantic testament to the incompatibility of money and taste. It’s hard to walk around Stanford without thinking about rich men: Alumni Jerry Yang and David...
3 tags
The Little Nicholson Baker in my Mind →
BY PAUL LA FARGE
Once, when I was in college, one of my closest friends came down with something and developed strange white nodules in his throat. He stood in front of the mirror in our room (we were roommates that semester), his mouth wide open, transfixed by these growths; finally, by dint of a certain amount of coughing, he was able to get a few of them out of his throat into the palm...
4 tags
Pük, Memory →
by Paul La Farge
I first read about Volapük in the Skeptical Inquirer, a magazine so violently opposed to anything out of the ordinary that it once studied the dates of thousands of shipwrecks to prove that the moon has no influence on maritime disasters. In his survey of artificial languages from Esperanto to Klingon, the critic Martin Gardner paused to describe the first really popular...
3 tags
The Brain on Trial →
by David Eagleman
On the steamy first day of August 1966, Charles Whitman took an elevator to the top floor of the University of Texas Tower in Austin. The 25-year-old climbed the stairs to the observation deck, lugging with him a footlocker full of guns and ammunition. At the top, he killed a receptionist with the butt of his rifle. Two families of tourists came up the stairwell; he shot at...
1 tag
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...
8 tags
The Hippies →
by Hunter S Thompson (via TETW)
The best year to be a hippie was 1965, but then there was not much to write about, because not much was happening in public and most of what was happening in private was illegal. The real year of the hippie was 1966, despite the lack of publicity, which in 1967 gave way to a nationwide avalanche—in Look, Life, Time, Newsweek, the Atlantic, the New York Times, the...
Or Are You Happy to See Me? →
Dimensions of a Lap Dance with Evan Hughes
Summer took off my glasses with a swift, practiced motion, the better to wrap her breasts around the bridge of my nose. “Can you still see okay?” Her first move, it must be said, was devastating. Straddling my legs with her knees on my chair, she flicked her long blonde hair over the top of my head so that the two of us were now in a sort of dark,...
3 tags
The Mooing of The Ruminant →
Lipsyte on Houellebecq
It’s hard to be a writer of scandalous fiction these days. By this I don’t mean a scandalous writer, a bad-boy or girl, which is more a matter of addictions and tattoos, a penchant for personal insult. Calling a better or better-known writer a fraud or a wuss makes for fun copy, but it doesn’t exactly shake the walls of the temple. No, what I mean by scandalous is work...
2 tags
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
Bernard...
3 tags
Back in the Day →
Before the weirdness claimed his legacy, Michael Jackson understood his talent—and what he was willing to do for it—better than we ever have
By John Jeremiah Sullivan
how do you talk about Michael Jackson unless you begin with Prince Screws? Prince Screws was an Alabama cotton-plantation slave who became a tenant farmer after the Civil War, likely on his old master’s land. His son,...
5 tags
Feet in Smoke →
by John Jeremiah Sullivan (via LF)
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...
3 tags
You Don't Know Madonna →
by Jennifer Egan
Unlike a lot of people in my generation, I was never all that interested in Madonna. I knew about her, of course (how could anyone not?) but I didn’t really want to know, and over the years this forcible knowing engendered in me a blustering sort of resentment. Why do I have to keep hearing about this woman? I wondered, sometimes aloud, jabbing a finger at yet another picture...
1 tag
Deniers →
by Sam Lipsyte
So. Her father was a Survivor. Her mother had not survived. And Mandy? Nineteen years later, Mandy semi-survived, had three months clean, some fluorescent key-ring tags to prove it. Her ex-boyfriend Greg had tags, too, wore them snaked together off his belt. Mandy saw him at meetings, but she worried that he wasn’t letting the program work on him, was maybe just white-knuckling...
The Perfectly Aged Weirdness of Zach Galifianakis →
by Devin Friedman
It’s time to take the tour, he says, so we get into his truck, which contains a diligently curated sample of many of the sandwich wrappers available on the North Carolina interstate. Especially a place called Bojangles’. There is also a white Macintosh laptop that looks like what you might call his “outdoor” computer.
As we check out the blackberry...
3 tags
The Lyman Family's Holy Siege of America →
by David Felton
“The Manson Family preached peace and love and went around killing people. We don’t preach peace and love…” Jim Kweskin
Five years ago a small community of young white intellectuals and artists from the Boston-Cambridge area moved onto the hill and “took over” several empty apartment houses bordering the park. Relations with the black...
3 tags
Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers →
by Tom Wolfe
Going downtown to mau-mau the bureaucrats got to be the routine practice in San Francisco. The poverty program encouraged you to go in for mau-mauing. They wouldn’t have known what to do without it. The bureaucrats at City Hall and in the Office of Economic Opportunity talked “ghetto” all the time, but they didn’t known any more about what was going on in...
2 tags
Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny's →
by Tom Wolfe
… and now, in the season of Radical Chic, the Black Panthers. That huge Panther there, the one Felicia is smiling her tango smile at, is Robert Bay, who just 41 hours ago was arrested in an altercation with the police, supposedly over a .38-caliber revolver that someone had, in a parked car in Queens at Northern Boulevard and 104th Street or some such unbelievable place, and...
2 tags
The State of Things...
This is the New York Times Best Seller List, from October, 1961. A depressing reminder that we have slid several rungs down the evolutionary/intellectual ladder –– as it stands, today’s NY Times list features a “telepathic waitress” called “Sookie Stackhouse” who solves crimes; no end of mob lawyers; an ex-government operative called “Cotton Malone”; yet...
3 tags
The Leap →
Next week, Teddy Graubard would have graduated from Dalton—a brilliant teenager, with a mild form of Asperger’s, whose path seemed almost limitless. So what led him to the window?
by Jesse Green
Teddy stood before the eleventh-story window. Other than figuring out how to fold his large body through its small opening, what was he thinking? A family friend would later say he was “probably trying...
4 tags
A Thin Line Between Mother and Daughter →
by Jennifer Egan,
My stepsister Marcia and I share an occasional lust for high grease breakfast foods, and over pancakes and eggs recently, she told me something interesting. Marcia’s daughter, Drennan, was with us — a wily, emphatic little girl who, at 4 years old, is young enough that one can still spell words in her presence and elude — just — the clamp of her...
4 tags
Mind Control and The Internet →
by Sue Halpern
Early this April, when researchers at Washington University in St. Louis reported that a woman with a host of electrodes temporarily positioned over the speech center of her brain was able to move a computer cursor on a screen simply by thinking but not pronouncing certain sounds, it seemed like the Singularity—the long-standing science fiction dream of melding man and machine to...
4 tags
The Baddest lawyer in the History of Jersey →
by Mark Jacobson, via LF
Clay D., a moon-faced man in his early thirties who, by his own matter-of-fact admission, has spent a good deal of his life “shooting at people” in and around Newark, New Jersey, was talking about his first attorney-client meeting with lawyer Paul Bergrin.
“Someone got killed, and they were trying to put it on me,” remembers Clay, as he asked to be called....
5 tags
Rwanda in Six Scenes →
Stephen W. Smith, ex-Africa editor of Libération and Le Monde, unpicks Rwanda
A number of memories connected with Rwanda play in my mind like scenes from a movie, although I don’t pretend they add up to a film. In 1994 a genocide was committed against the Tutsi minority in Rwanda. All else about this small East African country, ‘the land of a thousand hills’, is open to question and, indeed,...
4 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....
2 tags
My Life and Times in American Publishing →
by Carla Blumenkranz
(Note: a pretty accurate picture of life in the publishing industry.)
Kristy taught me how to answer the phone by saying her name, which I quickly turned into an incoherent song. (Later, her boyfriend would call just to make me say it, then laugh and insist he was various conservative pundits.) She showed me how to read manuscripts she didn’t want from agents—by shuffling...
1 tag
Hegel at Georgetown →
by Thomas Chatterton Williams
Dr. Ver Eecke, a balding man with thick accent and jowls, looked anachronistically like a philosopher, always in a gray three-piece suit and almost always in his office, working. He took me under his wing and agreed to teach me The Phenomenology of Spirit on a one-on-one basis. He cautioned beforehand that it was “probably the most difficult book in the world.” We...
3 tags
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...
3 tags
The Last Wailer →
by John Jeremiah Sullivan
At a certain point, I underwent what I can only assume was a momentary hallucination of some type. Strange things were happening to Bunny’s face as he spoke. Different races were passing through it, through the cast of his features—black, white, Asian, Indian, the whole transnational human slosh that produced the West Indies. The Atlantic world was passing...
