1. The author of the original Friday Night Lights, Buzz Bissinger, dropped as offbeat and not-quite-repentant a tale of addiction on GQ this month as I have ever come across. A convergence of shopping and sex addiction rooted in Law-induced despair (never being able to measure up to initial success) and plain old powerlessness, the circumstances are so outrageous you almost wonder if it’s a prank. Like many an addict/human being, Bissinger is peculiar mix of self-loathing and self-indulgence, both fearful and proud at the same time, his smatterings of wisdom covered up by layers of misanthropic confusion and a…
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Another Week Ends: Gucci Addictions, Narcissism Epidemics, DFW, Phone vs. Heart, PZ on Drones (on CNN), R. Crumb, Tale of Two Suedes, and Kung Fu Grandpa
The Guilty Heart of a Ghetto Dependent: Justice for the Sake of Peace
This one comes to us from none other than Jonathan Adams:
“Just before Christmas 2010, a 36-year-old black man, Trevell Coleman, walks into a police station in Harlem and tells the cops that something’s been troubling him. He was involved in a shooting many years ago, sixteen or seventeen years ago, and has information they might want to hear. At first the cops take his name and number, tell him to go home, we’ll look into it, but that was a long time ago. They never call.
He goes back into the station a few weeks later. It is really eating…
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Another Week Ends: Willy Loman Preaches, Complicated Mourning, Extroversion Mandates, Celebrity Marriage Formulas, Dependency Dilemmas, Kontiki, Mad Men and Rowan Williams
1. A little over four weeks until our Spring Conference in NYC (4/19-21), which means that on Monday night 3/19, the “Earlybird rates” will expire ($150/couple or $100/person all-inclusive). You can’t say we didn’t warn you… If you need an extra push, earlier this week the Episcopal News Service published a generous piece about Mockingbird, which describes our past conferences in flattering terms. So pre-register today! And speaking of our little organization, in the you-can’t-make-this-stuff-up department, a killer Mbird headline appeared in The NY Times recently that was just too uncanny not to share, “Nazareth Defeats Christ the King in…
High-School Jesus Phases and Doubts About One’s Doubts
How to create a Pavlovian response in yours truly: 1. Produce extended, compassionate essays on Michael Jackson and Axl Rose. 2. Let it slip that you were raised Episcopalian. 3. Prompt a number of your colleagues to compare you with David Foster Wallace, going so far as to proclaim you his literary heir. 4. Write an extremely funny and not entirely unsympathetic article about a Christian Rock festival. This is what John Jeremiah Sullivan has done in the past few years.
I remember reading his piece on the initial GNR comeback shows in 2006 and thinking it was the best writing…
Paying Taxes To The Pale King
Tax Day marks the release of Mockingbird icon David Foster Wallace’s posthumous novel, The Pale King. Quotes forthcoming, but from the few reviews that have appeared already, it sounds predictably ripe… Italics mine.
Michiko Kakutani in The NY Times: [DFW's] posthumous unfinished novel, “The Pale King” — which is set largely in an I.R.S. office in the Midwest — depicts an America so plagued by tedium, monotony and meaningless bureaucratic rules and regulations that its citizens are in danger of dying of boredom.
Just as this lumpy but often stirring new novel emerges as a kind of bookend…
Friction and Addiction in New Social Media
A fascinating read, from beginning to end, in GQ about what’s going on behind the “New Social Media” phenomenon in Silicon Valley, “The Viral Me”. The answer appears to be a peculiar form of narcissism, which is as idealistic about changing the way people relate as it is cynical in its understanding of how to do so. In other words, these guys are attempting to (and succeeding in) exploit our addictive tendencies (via endlessly random incentives) and predict our self-justifying impulses for the sake of efficiency and harmony. At bottom, all this new tech is exciting, terrifying and very, very…
michael cooper: Thanks for this fantastic interview...what an honest man. The Heaney p...
Todd Brewer: A brilliant, but sad, analysis. The fall of Michael and George Michael...
Clay: Michael - You could have also named this article "The Grace of Looking...
Tam: oh man, that last paragraph. I really needed that today. Thanks....
Marianne Brian: Loved it. So, so true! I love Ethanisms, as well!...