Is this like something you have to be? Or automatically become?

And why are there these special, all-cringeworthy words for getting older?

Why aren’t I the same person, in somewhat different form? Read the rest of this entry »

This morning the first issue of my new subscription to the London Review of Books arrived; I have some dim memory of subscribing to the site … but this appearance of the thing in print, in the mail of all things, felt rather odd,  as I’ve read the site for years. Mostly to read up every bit of Jenny Diski, a writer with whom I used to exchange links and the occasional email, but then when I read that the woman who brought her up, in her teenage years, happened to be, of all people, Doris Lessing—perhaps it was then I fell silent. Read the rest of this entry »

This post heralds a … lazier bitch. No, that’s not entirely true … but I am both a more tired bitch than when this blog started out, in 2004 … and am funneling more writing energy into, like, you know, real writing. God, I used to write here with such passion. And it’s true, there are periods in my life—it varies from month-to-month, for various and sundry medical reasons—when the flow of words just won’t quit. When I end posts more out of mercy to the reader than because I’ve run out of things to say.
Read the rest of this entry »

It was J.D. Salinger who taught me how to write. Not the man, but a person who seemed perfectly real to me—Salinger’s startling gift to literature, these people, their human vitality—Seymour, the oldest of the Glass children. Buddy, his brother, reads aloud, as it were, the letter that comprises Seymour, Read the rest of this entry »

Clusterfuck Nation Moron culture in the USA really got full traction after the Second World War. Our victory over the other industrial powers in that struggle was so total and stupendous that the laboring orders here were raised up to economic levels unknown by any peasantry in human history. People who had been virtual serfs trailing cotton sacks in the sunstroke belt a generation back were suddenly living better than Renaissance dukes, laved in air-conditioning, banqueting on “TV dinners,” motoring on a whim to places that would have taken a three-day mule trek in their grandaddy’s day.  Soon, they were buying Buick dealerships and fried chicken franchises and opening banks and building leisure kingdoms of thrill rides and football.  It’s hard to overstate the fantastic wealth that a not-very-bright cohort of human beings was able to accumulate in post-war America.

Read the rest of this entry »

Is this my first Shoot Me of the year? If so, it’s mighty late in coming. Though this one’s joyous, even funny: I am head over heels with Adam Gopnik, with his piece on Dan Brown— and think no one need ever bother to write again. To wit—in every sense of the word—

The clichés line up outside the dust jacket and are whisked in pairs to a table down front …

Couldn’t you just die? Of course The New Yorker always did have the funniest writers around.  It’s just that Gopnik’s talent seems somehow … unnecessary. Do we really need such wit and seriousness and, above all, profligacy?

I hardly think so. Read the rest of this entry »

I knew was no ordinary FakeSteve (I will restore your sense of childlike wonder. There is nothing you can do to stop me) post when I came upon this striking triad of sentences.

Well, this is the world we are living in. These are the people we are dealing with. This is how we have to deal with them.

Suddenly Dan began to write, the post took off somewhere new, combining the virtual with the real in a manner that took my breath away, and that of any other reader with a grain of sense. Read the rest of this entry »