My father did consulting for years. Whenever he—or my uncle, also a consultant—began talking about work, I thought about their offices. They were small, poorly-lit rooms with terrible furniture, located in commercial parks off county roads. They were depressing. My … Read More
‘Reading,’ as describing a certain activity of eye-sliding-over-page, with eye recognizing ink blobs corresponding (by means of whatever neural calculus) either (1) to something like second-order phonemes, and therefore to certain aural centers and therefore to speech-parts of the brain, which ‘articulate’ meaning to other parts, or (2) to something like second-order morphemes, and therefore to certain visual centers, and therefore to picture-parts of the brains, which ‘project’ meanings to other parts, or (3) to some combination of (1) and (2)[1]—well, ignore that or bracket it, because I have 1,000 words and a little over, say, ten minutes to argue for long and arduous works of literature, their import and glory—and, specifically, for the particularly long and particularly arduous recent novels of Roberto Bolaño and David Foster Wallace.
Attending Spettacolo! is like attending any number of Midwestern dinner theaters—the crowd’s mostly composed of silver-maned pensioners, the actors’ accents are comically bad and the plot is full of slapstick, “audience participation,” and a high degree of fuzzy-wuzzyness.
“I couldn’t discern an agenda, political, spiritual, or otherwise, and yet the novel felt anything but aimless. Primarily, it read and resonated like poetry.”
This week, in the annual Summer Issue, the Nass reflects on nostalgia for the iPhone 6, bends like a blade of grass, and writes poems from a Costco gas station.
We were ripped off, as usual, as the three of us stepped out of the taxi and into a steamy, puddle-filled section of Hanoi. Adam, a towering Beta from Long Island, wasn’t too happy. “Fifty five thousand fucking dong! Fuck … Read More
