June 2009
27 posts
“Is our discussion purely literary? I think not. I do not believe that any...”
– Georg Lukács, “Realism in the Balance”
n+1 and its discontents: an introduction
Look at This Fucking Hipster Basher - Robert Lanham (via ponymalta)
Yes. There was, a month back, a panel discussion on whether the hipster had lost his historical moment and too soon, and then somewhat peacably came the realization that the hipster may well be here to stay, that the borders between yourself and a hipster have become permeable and inconsequent, and that the nation may be infected...
“The symposium was called “What Was the Hipster?”…The audience could have found...”
– See above.
Villains: duplicity and the novelization of...
This has been my on-going masochism.
I wrote my boyfriend a letter just four days ago describing the chief villains of most British women’s fiction of the 19th century: duplicity, and the novelization of feelings. (I described these, because I suffer them now that he is in Houston doing institute work for Teach for America. I am moving to Mississippi September 1 to be near my...
City Criticism
Celia long thought the human condition a topographic endeavor (her graduate thesis examined the psychology of place—perhaps to circumvent examining the psychology of herself); and, her present condition resolved the latitudes of her crimes, for she believed them to be crimes and reveled in them so. On the seventeenth floor she worked with a victims rights agency, “in the advocacy division”—a term...
Holding a flame for Caleb Crain
—Well, yes. After reading (yes, I even bought and devoured his academic book American Sympathy) whatever google-trolling produced of Mr. Crain’s published work, I’m now buying his blog compendium, scintillatingly titled The Wreck of the Henry Clay. This handsome book-thing will gladly fit into the cargo pockets of khaki shorts, or you can store it in a backpack or just hold it. Also it...
poor
I don’t have any money.
But I do believe in you.
I have never been poorer.
But I won’t.
I have so much debt.
But that.
I don’t have any prospects.
Why did I come back home.
Campus Romp/Gay Sex Opener
Notice: After plowing through works by Jim Grimsley, Andre Aciman, Alan Hollinghurst, Andrew Holleran, Edmund White, James Baldwin, Christopher Isherwood, and Daniel Mendhelson, I’ve been questing after the literary gay lingua franca that opens up the robust and petty tendencies of a genre that maintains dignity even whilst describing such cumbersom and homely activities as lubricating the...
