comix links/what I've been reading DOUBLE HEADER

Back in February I made a deal with myself to read a book every week, and I've been posting about it here to hold myself accountable. I'm behind! I've been busy lately and I'm so, so behind. But I'm not giving up. Plus I have some comics links? What a special treat for you.

Salem's Lot by Stephen King
I absolutely love vampire stories, so I was a little nervous about rereading this childhood favorite. Needn't have worried: totally holds up. Turns out King's tendency to set stories in hokey small towns pairs particularly well with the theme of 'corrupted by the undead.' There's this one sweeping scene in particular where he describes all these vampires in this tiny town bedding down in their hidey holes that's so, so good.

With this read of Salem's Lot I felt like I really came to understand why Stephen King was so appealing to me as a kid. The main thing, which I feel sure has occurred to literally everyone else who's read a lot of Stephen King, is that some of his best characters are themselves children. Mark Petrie is the best character by a mile in Salem's Lot, and there were an awful lot of well-written kids in his other stories, at least the way I remember it--The Shining, Pet Semetery, It, etc. Firestarter. Carrie. The other big thing is that it's much easier to overlook bad prose and technical flaws when you're a kid because your brain doesn't work so great yet. Recently I was talking about trashy reads with a friend and I mentioned Stephen King and he was all, "I just think good storytelling is good storytelling," and what could I say? I can see you think I'm being a real twit, but I write things for a living, so I guess it's hard for me to overlook when a Storyteller needs a better editor. Anyway Salem's Lot isn't perfect, but I think it's a much better book than The Stand (the last thing I reread).

I think my next Stephen King reread will be The Shining.

The Zookeeper's Wife by Diane Ackerman
I had to read this book for work, but it bears mentioning because this story is seriously bananas like whoa. It's horribly overwritten, but if you can get past that it's this enormously charming and sad (and true) story about these Polish zookeepers who turned their facilities into a sort of Underground Railroad stop for the resistance after Nazis murdered all of their zoo animals. :( There's also all this crazy stuff (that I didn't know, at least) about how the Nazis' ideas about "purity" weren't just about eugenics, but also about the plant and animal kingdoms. For ex, the zookeeper couple knew this other zookeeper in Berlin who became a Nazi officer during the war, and he became obsessed with inbreeding even though that totally went against some of the most basic principles of zoology.

Anyway you've probably heard of this book because there's about to be a big movie? I hadn't, but I'm not on top of these things. It's got Jessica Chastain and everything! Looks terrible, but I recommend the book.

Tiny Beautiful Things by Cheryl Strayed
This was another book for work--a collection of the "Dear Sugar" columns that this novelist wrote for the Rumpus a few years back. New Sincerity--that whole thing has been out of fashion for a while, but I have real affection for it. Maybe it's where I am. I live in Chicago these days. I think Dave Eggers and Stephen Elliott read "California," but they both come from here. David Foster Wallace wrote Infinite Jest in Normal, Illinois. (Isn't that perfect?) Sufjan is from Detroit. I'm not sure that Isaac Fitzgerald moving to Buzzfeed symbolized anything so much as maybe he was tired of being poor? The Rumpus seems to be run by a halfwit these days, that's probably not helping anything...

Anyway one of my Opinions is that one day, when we look back on the Snark vs. "Smarm" War, Smarm will be vindicated. I sort of go back and forth between being a snarky person with an earnest streak and an earnest person with a snarky streak. I struggle with sincerity, like I find it really, really admirable but also disgusting? I suspect this is generational, but maybe it was some childhood incident. Point is I think too much of either is not so great, and I'm suspicious of anyone who seems too committed either way.

"Dear Sugar" was an advice column, a form that is repulsive to me. I think people who write advice columns are maybe the most unbearable of us all. But this lady seems mostly okay, if a bit much, and parts of this book were very good.

"White Artist's Painting of Emmett Till at Whitney Biennial Draws Protests" (NYT)
There was a whole thing on Twitter the other day about Peter Bagge's Zora Neale Hurston comic, and I found reading about this other kinda-sorta similar controversy somewhat clarifying. Sometimes questions get framed in a way that people dismiss as incorrect, and thus aren't taken seriously by the people who need to consider them the most. Like...on one level some of the questions being raised around the comic were incorrect. You know, "why was Peter Bagge hired to do this" was answered with "he wasn't"...then the argument sort of shifted to pitting Bagge's extant Zora Neale Hurston biography against a non-existent Zora Neale Hurston biography by a black cartoonist, as though Bagge won out over this other imaginary comic...which finally turned into "why didn't Bagge give this idea to a black cartoonist," the answer to which I think is sort of obvious. But, you know, I read Bagge's Margaret Sanger comic back before I got delisted by D&Q for suggesting that they didn't publish enough women, so I can say with some confidence that it's confusing why anyone thinks his books on "great women in history" or whatever are worth publishing. Like I was mad that I even read it, and that book was free. Totally artless and uninspired. IMO that guy has nothing to say.

Why is Peter Bagge publishing a series about women's experiences at D&Q? Well, I'll tell you why: because D&Q prefers to publish men, by a margin of about 3:1. With regard to race, white to everyone else, that ratio is probably worse. And if you look at artists they "take a chance on" vs. translations, reprints, and artists that otherwise came to them with an established audience? Fucking abysmal. This is a particularly curious choice, given that they're subsidized by the Canadian government. Shouldn't they have more room to take risks?

Then there's the other part half of the equation, the nonblack-artist-depicting-black-experience part. From the Bagge comic thing to the Till painting controversy to the Djann Mann Island cover, there seems to be a standing question about whether or not it's OK for a nonblack person to take on a black subject. And I want to answer that in two ways, with no pretense of having Real Answers, and the obvious acknowledgment of who I am--i.e., the whitest person you know.

I think the first answer, the easy answer, is yes, it's OK. On the level of the artist, yes, OK. What makes it less OK is when nearly all of the representations of black culture that are accepted by gatekeepers into the Holy Institutions--Drawn & Quarterly, the Whitney, whatever it is--are by white artists. Then it's fucking dubious. Then it gets special scrutiny, particularly when the art rehashes stereotypes that are already the status quo, or sterilizes something messy.

The second answer is less straightforward. More of a Mystic Anecdote, really. A few weeks ago, for work, I was talking to the head of curation at the Smithsonian's new museum of African-American art and culture. He was telling me about collecting Emmett Till's casket, the original one, which became available after he was exhumed. Till's mother offered the casket to the museum, and at first they weren't even sure that they wanted it. It was obviously an important historical artifact but it was so charged, so painful, so difficult, that there was like a series of meetings amongst all the curators and the head of the museum about whether or not this was a thing that should even be collected, much less displayed. Eventually they came to the conclusion that it should, and they did. In listening to this story, I felt with absolute certainty that if a staff of (mostly) white people at much pretty any institution were offered that, they would have accepted it immediately.

There's this series of children's mysteries by Daniel Handler, All the Wrong Questions. Sometimes you start with the wrong questions. But this is valuable, in that you come to understand the right ones.


A sad and intimate profile of the late Geneviève Castré's husband (at Pitchfork)

Phil Eleverum has written an album about his late wife's death, and Pitchfork sent a very gifted writer who recently lost a child to profile him. This is just an incredible read--a portrait of Elverum that ends up being a portrait of Geneviève, too. I'm haunted by this description of a "children's book" (not sure if it was a comic?) that she finished before her death:

I mean, Jesus. This is of those things that you know is going to stay with you for a while.

The guy who tweeted a strobe light at Kurt Eichenwald has been arrested
My feelings on this don't seem to be quite so strong as most people's. I mean, the FBI went into the strobe light attacker's twitter and found, like, 20 tweets that were some variation on "After much thought and careful research, I've decided I want to murder Kurt Eichenwald with this strobe light tweet," and that's plainly indefensible. On that level I guess I'm glad that guy is in trouble, because fuck that guy. Where I feel more confused is about the broader implications for the case...haven't yet seen any clear analysis on that. Eichenwald's lawyer argued that a strobe tweet's no different than anthrax and bombs and that seems demonstrably untrue. And on another level still, while I in no way wish Kurt Eichenwald ill, much less want him to die...when Death comes for him, as it must come for us all, please god let him get him be the one person on earth to die by tweets because, seriously, lol.

Admittedly I'm a little hung up on the fact that I think Kurt Eichenwald is a lying liar, which I realize isn't germane, but still. That tweet from his "wife" after the strobe tweet looks soooooo fake. Right? Super fake. I think that's objectively true, and not just my utter contempt for Kurt Eichenwald talking?

Botton line, the best (and safest) way to own Kurt Eichenwald now, as ever, is to tweet him his own picture without comment. Let's just stick with that. You may also tweet as his wife.

Journalist pretends that Kellyanne Conway is human for some reason (at New York magazine)
For me the major takeaway here is that Kellyanne snacks on the exact same gum as Sean Spicer. Like eats the gum as though it were food. What is going on with these people????

Internet Feminists seem to be doing some real soul-searching about what to do with old Kellyanne, which is both dumb and tedious. I think the bigger issue with this particular article is that Olivia Nuzzi is sort of bad at her job.

If you're trying to write a profile that humanizes Kellyanne Conway, I'm going to need something more than "eats gum as though it were food." But also what this writer seems to regard as a surprising air of human warmth comes across to me as Kellyanne palpably playing a role, a character. She just seems so intensely fake?

You know, there's this thing sometimes where reality really is black & white. That's just been one of my takeaways from this life, as an old person. LOL @ this young reporter wanting me to be impressed with her wide-eyed wonder at the humanity of the Trump administration.

How Dilbert's Scott Adams Got Hypnotized by Trump
I feel like anyone who reads this blog has surely read this by now, but I'd be remiss not to include this, one of the most fascinating things I've ever read. The whole first section is sort of a boring rehash of his election-related insanity but after that it's pure wizard magic. Like...from here on out, this article is the only thing I want to talk about with anyone, ever. What's your favorite detail? I have given this great consideration. Right now it is: his two perfectly named religious-themed novellas, The Religion War and God's Debris. But this changes pretty much daily. I'm also obsessed with the part where he forgets how to talk.

I sort of want to read those novellas.

New Trends in Getting Mad Online by Felix Biederman and Virgil Texas
Last in this lineup, but first in my heart, we have the sequel to "The Nine Canonical Responses to 'U Mad'," one of my absolute favorite Internet things of all time. I've considered adapting it for comics many times, but it's too depressing, and anyway it would just be like 9 examples of Nick Spencer owning himself.

This piece is not as good as the original, but it's still very very good. It begins with maybe the truest observation I've seen in a while, or maybe ever:

The act of melting down on the internet...has gone from a niche pastime of crackpots to the central animating force of our politics.

Some of these stories--Jen Kirkman, Jeff Jarvis--I saw unfold in real time, and they were incredible to behold, but the Michael Rapaport story was news to me. Oh my god, it's so good.

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justin thinking about justin

A friend who's going through some of her old stuff just sent me a photo of this Valentine's Day card I made for her maybe 15 years ago.

I'm fairly certain that's Justin Timberlake thinking about Justin Timberlake and make no mistake: when I made this thing, I was a grown-ass adult. It sort of feels like this image should be my About Me section for everything from now on, or possibly my business card.

Justin thinking about Justin is obviously a very powerful work, but I'm not sure that even it can make up for my pathetic selection for Book of the Week. (If you're new to this, I'm reading one not-for-work book every week, then gloating about it here.) And, okay, a busy week capped off by a visit from some old friends has resulted in my really phoning it in on this one. I mean, this is some seriously shameful shit: Food Rules by Michael Pollan.

First and foremost, despite the fact that I'm a relatively nonviolent feeble person, Michael Pollan fully lived up to my expectation of coming across as someone I really want to punch. I'd been vaguely thinking about reading one of his other books for various dumb reasons (it was free, and I've been reading stuff like it because I've had a whole boring health thing), but then I saw this after I'd already more or less given up on reading anything this week (which would have been most unwise, as it would've inevitably lead to me dumping my book pledge). At 140 pages, why not? As it turns out this book is much shorter than that, even. Really it's more like a long brochure, if brochures had no information in them whatsoever.

My favorite of Pollan's stupid food rules was definitely "Don't eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food." My own great-grandmother famously ate Vick's Vaporub every night before bed for "health reasons," so if you imagine for one second that crazy old bitch wouldn't recognize Pizza flavor Combos as a foodstuff, think again Pollan. This whole romanticized notion of women in the olden days is actually a big theme in the book and guess what, I hate it. There's this one part at the beginning where he talks about having consulted with lots of doctors and scientists and mothers and grandmothers. A million years ago, I saw a tweet from a guy who was re-watching Waiting for Guffman and he was like "hmm, this seems really homophobic to me. Is this what it means to be radicalized?" And first of all, yes, that sounds about right (the radicalized part), but second of all I often ask a similar question of myself when I'm pondering the way some book or comic talks about women. Like, was Pollan really setting up a dichotomy there between doctors & scientists vs. mothers & grandmothers, or is that just my own shit? Who cares, he sucks. I'm going to do better next week.

Here are some other random things that caught my eye:

"Bustle and the Industrialization of Confession" (Gawker)
This piece is about a year old, but it was vaguely alluded to in this (bad) blog post by Sam Kriss. I'm really interested in the way people talk about the so-called industry of confession. And despite knowing something about that subject, I somehow missed that this was a thing:

Turns out the site that Kriss is talking about here is Bustle, by the way, which makes perfect sense. I'm not sure if this is still their practice, but as recently as a year ago they were asking their freelancers to tell them about abortions, drug addictions, sexual experiences, etc. At Gawker, Rich Juzwiak had some smart things to say about that:

I can hardly bring myself to believe that survey is real. I have mixed feelings about "write what you know" with regard to identity politics. Sometimes it's pretty obviously true, and sometimes less so. But asking women to disclose rapes and abortions and threesomes or whatever in their welcome packet? Jesus.

That blog from Kriss is the most pretentious thing I've read in a while. My feeling is that if you're going to be really pretentious you've got to show me the money. The money is...not this:

This is a very common distinction that people make, the "true" self vs. the online self, and what I object to isn't the possibility that we each are more or less a collection of identities, but in the primacy and integrity of some pristine true secret self that lives above it all. Different people and different places bring out different facets of identity, and if you don't get that right out of the gate I have zero interest in your opinions on identity. Zero.

"The Year's Best Weird Internet Video Gets Its Viral Payoff" (Gawker)
Speaking of old Gawker... I was sitting around the other night thinking about Videogum, as is my wont, when I remembered this old video I'm obsessed with:



Videogum archives are impossible to search so I googled some iteration of "sword children dancing" and found this explainer on what was up with these people, anyway. In some ways it's exactly what you'd expect...you don't need real powers of deduction to recognize that the video is neither 100 percent "authentic" (due to blatant art kid stuff) or "fake" (because of the girl's obvious expertise in whatever it is she's doing). Still, I never quite imagined this scenario (this is the guy talking):

And that, children, is where viral videos come from.

"Different Women's March, Same Message" (NYT)
Oh look, Missoni did a pussy hat.

"The pussy hat arrived on the runway," writes some lady at the New York Times:

The designer Angela Missoni and the rest of the extended Missoni clan, including her mother, Rosita, crowded onto the runway in their hats and urged everyone, along with all their models, to join them to “show the world the fashion community is united and fearless.” In the background, “Power to the People” played.

God, just kill me.

"The Latest Lesson in My Five-Year Journey toward Figuring Out that Françoise Mouly Possibly Sucks"
Not sure if I'll be doing any comics links this week, so allow me to direct your attention to the most recent cover of the New Yorker, which is about representation:

It's titled #OscarsNotSoWhite." Oh, and here's the guy who made it:

Remember when I said there are some cases where identity politics obviously matter when it comes to choosing which creator you publish? Well, this is that.

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I hope these aren't too boring

I don't know why I'm not writing about comics lately. What even happened this week? I guess Milo died, that was sort of exciting. (I consider him Honorary Comics, having been officially endorsed by the CBLDF and all.) Turns out child-fucking is not good for your brand. Who knew. Except, well, okay, sometimes it's good for your brand. Jon Benet's been dead for 20 years and she was a Lifetime movie last year. But, listen, if your brand involves child fucking, you can't do edgelord. Everyone knows that. You've got to do, like, full-on Nancy Grace faux outrage drag or get a middle-aged actor to play Chuck Bass. No one wants to hear your defense of child rape...unless you're writing a terrible thinkpiece on Game of Thrones, or maybe defending R Crumb. Those are the rules.

For anyone who might be confused about whether or not grown men should have sex with 13-yos we thankfully have Twitter heroes like Kurt Eichenwald. As the father of two large sons (at least one of whom does kung fu) and the savior of countless teens, he's out here to help all the rest of us plebes who've hated Milo for the last two years discern right from wrong:

Yes, American hero Kurt Fucking Eichenwald, who "saved" teens from pedophiles by...writing his 18-year-old source a personal check for $2,000? It's called journalism, and who am I to argue with it. I'm really sorry, because I'm getting off topic here--and I'm not into ugly shaming most of the time, I'm really not--but my absolute favorite burn on the internet is when people tweet Kurt Eichenwald his own photograph without comment:

Nothing will ever be funnier than this to me, unless you count the large sons. Sometimes I google "Eichenwald large sons" when I'm feeling down. How large exactly are the sons, I wonder, and do they have heads like Kurt's?

I haven't even looked at tweets 1, 3, or 4 in this series cause I'm saving them for a rainy day.

So...I don't mean to make light of pedophilia, which is bad, and obviously quite different than watching adults pretend to be teens on the CW. But--and I think the Eichenwald thing illustrates this really well--the way we talk about it is super fucking fake. Just this endless loop of self-aggrandizement for eeking out a pass in Humanity 101. And the fakest thing of all is the pretense that CPAC or Simon & Schuster or Brietbart or other entity gives a flimsy fuck about Milo's views on molestation apart from how much they impact their respective brands. (Roxane Gay lays this out quite clearly, I think.) Plainly Milo has said and done way worse. For that matter Bill Maher has said and done way worse. Maher is basically the proto-Milo. I guess no one has shot anyone in the name of Bill Maher, but he's stoked some serious, serious Islamophobic bullshit for...I don't know exactly. Since 2001, anyway. How is it that anyone on earth has any interest in that guy's opinions on anything? Who is watching that show?? Is it for the people who used to watch Entourage?

Let me share a secret with you: the Milo thing isn't about children. Not really. I mean, there are people who care, of course there are, but what we're really talking about in this moment is Democrats who care about children insofar as they can make themselves feel like heroes, Republicans who care about children insofar as they can use them as an excuse to oppress trans people (and, barring that, will accept making themselves feel like heroes as a distant second best), and corporations that are only capable of caring about money. If any of the above cared about children then people wouldn't be able to buy Jason Bourne-grade weapons arsenals in those roadside trailers that sell fireworks and go execute a class of kindergarteners. Every I think about that it makes me cry, and I have no hope whatsoever that it will change in my lifetime, but anyway I guess Milo talked about pederasty on a podcast and now the world is weighing the fuck in on the one issue that literally everyone except child molesters (and the President of the United States, probably) already agrees on. I'm glad that Simon & Schuster took back their book deal but let's not mistake that for progress.

Oh well, haha, time to get down to business. This is my third book report, and I don't know why I wrote that long preamble except that I'm vaguely worried these posts are boring and, well, unfortunately I'm disgruntled. Also I'm afraid this week is double boring because my book was just the sequel to Flowers in the Attic, which is awesomely titled Petals on the Wind. It's weird to me that doing these posts no one reads is enough to make me feel accountable about keeping my book pledge, but it seems to be working. Petals in the Wind isn't as good as the first book--there are some pacing problems, for one thing--but what really strikes me is that it's so much more rapey than I remember? I find this is a thing sometimes when I read books I loved when I was a kid. The whole series in a nutshell is Cathy getting raped by different kinds of men she then falls in love with. Also sometimes they rape her little sister. It's really deep though.

Here's some other stuff I found interesting this week:

"The Downfall of YouTube's Biggest Star Is a Symptom of a Bigger Illness" (Jacob Clifton @ Buzzfeed)
It's still insane to me that "Mommy, where do gamers come from" has become the question of our times, but here we are. One of my very favorite writers, Jacob Clifton, has addressed it in an uncharacteristically straightforward manner in a piece that connects the dots between that Swedish gamer guy, Milo, Gamergate, and the alt right, and I am so much smarter for it:

From this piece I also learned that Television Without Pity will be reanimating sometime this year and Clifton, who was the original site's best writer with a bullet, is going to be its deputy editor. TV recaps are the worst, except for TWOP, which is so, so great. I couldn't be more thrilled.

"YouTube's Monster: PewDiePie and His Populist Revolt" (John Herrman @ NYT)

Over at NYT Magazine, John Herrman also wrote about the Swedish gamer guy, studying the situation more in terms of social media ecosystems and how they're being monetized:

Herrman has long been the sharpest observer of this ecosystem we've got...so sharp, in fact, that often I have to read his stuff two to three times before I really get what the fuck he's even talking about. I only read this once because YouTube just isn't that interesting to me, but fortunately the takeaway was clear enough:

[Maker Studios'] severing of ties [with the swedish gamer guy], in the bigger context of YouTube, amounts to a disavowal. YouTube's reaction, and how it follows up, is the thing to watch.

Duly noted, Herrman. Ta.

'I'm Going to Give Up My Best Gift': George Saunders Discusses the Writing of His Offbeat Novel  (Vulture)
I don't often read books in real time (meaning when everyone else is reading them), but I think I'm going to do Lincoln in the Bardo. I'm not sure why, exactly, because I have the vague sense that I'm going to hate it. In any case I've read a couple interviews with George Saunders and I'm baffled that no one out there is asking the obvious question: George Saunders, what is going on with your head??

What's weird is that he looks exactly like before, only his mullet has taken on that very specific Chester Brown aesthetic of 100 strokes/night with a cat brush. I just need more information on these grooming choices.

Anyway this is mostly a very good interview, but here's the part that really struck me:

I'm a big believer in arbitrary parameters for art projects. I'll be interested to see how this choice played out.

"A Heavenly Respite at the Westminster Dog Show" (New Yorker)
I have never loved Twitter so much as when author Jia Tolentino posted photos from her day at the Westminster Dog Show:

This woman is living my dream and I'm not even mad. Best part of the article was about the breed that "once worked as rotisserie attendants, walking on medieval treadmills that rotated the spits holding meat over a fire." Dogs!!!!!!! I love you, dogs.

"Obama Reckons with a Trump Presidency" (New Yorker)
I finally read this David Remnick piece, which is about how Obama is "a scholar of his own predicament." It's very, very good. I've always known Obama's smart, but what I find interesting about him is that he's always smart in ways that surprise me. For instance in this piece, he shows that he's an incredibly savvy critic of social media:

I suppose I thought that, having been pretty busy for the last eight years, as these platforms devolved (matured?), Obama wouldn't be so insightful about this stuff. "Everything is true and nothing is true." I don't know, to me that's a much deeper take than blah blah blah FAKE NEWS. Here he is on Trump:

"Trump understands the new ecosystem, in which facts and truth don't matter. You attract attention, rouse emotions, and then move on. You can surf those emotions."

Surfing emotions...I'd never thought about it in quite in those terms, but that's exactly right. A brain like that bookended by W. and a reality television star who just hired a Sandy Hook truther. Just...what a thing, man. What a thing. What a thing.
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book report

My new thing is trying to read one non work-related book every week, and then write about it here along with whatever else caught my eye. Having now accomplished this two weeks in a row, it is slowly dawning on me that I might secretly be a perfect person who's capable of anything. I'm feeling very wise, very powerful. Let's begin.

Flowers in the Attic by V.C. Andrews
Over the weekend I was talking with a group of people about what we read when we were kids. I usually find that other girls who were big readers were into relatively literary books like Black Beauty or Laura Ingalls Wilder, but what I most loved to read was genre fiction. I spent maybe third and fourth grade reading and re-reading the ouerves of Stephen King, Dean R. Koontz, Thomas Harris, and Agatha Christie. I tried to explain this when a friend expressed shock that I hadn't read Anne of Green Gables. "I was more into Stephen King," I said. She was like, "Yeah, me too, but I wasn't reading him when I was ten." She wasn't getting it. "My favorite book in fourth grade was It," I explained. "I think that's why I'm like this."

Anyway another person there said something about V.C. Andrews and it had never really occurred to me until that moment how weird it was that one of my favorite series as a kid was about children who had to live in an attic? And then the brother and sister straight-up start fucking while they're imprisoned in the attic? And how I inherited those books from my cousin, so she must have read them too? I have no idea what the kids are reading these days, but it's weird to think there was a time when these insane gothic incest books were pretty much what young girls around the country were reading. Someone is bound to have written about this phenomenon somewhere; I'm going to have to look into this later. I just googled and saw a Slate take where the writer says that kids loved it because it dramatized the way that teens feel oppressed by their parents. Nah, I'm 99% sure it's about the incest.

As soon as my friend mentioned Flowers in the Attic I knew I was going to read it as soon as I got home. (I actually started out reading a totally different book this week, but it's going to have to wait.) I must've read this series half a dozen times when I was a kid, maybe more. What's remarkable is that Flowers in the Attic really holds up. A few years ago I reread The Stand and felt hugely disappointed. Woof. I'm not writing off Stephen King yet--I'll definitely reread Salem's Lot and It at some point--but it was almost enough to make me question my elementary school self's taste. Now I'm feeling vindicated because Flowers in the Attic is nearly perfect. I remembered everything that was going to happen, and still I was totally on the edge of my seat...when are these children going to start fucking? Can't wait for this brother and sister to fuck on their dirty attic mattress.

Clearly a book for people of all walks of life. Five stars.

"Liberal Fan Fiction: Too Many Memes Will Rot Your Brain" by Ezekiel Kweku
I wish I had written this piece. It's about what Kweku calls liberal fan fiction, which includes Biden memes, that idiotic game theory guy, and those blatantly fake 'rogue' twitters that purport to be government employees:

He even accounts for the new subgenre of liberal fan fiction where people imagine Trump et al to be competent manipulators (e.g., the 'balloon for a coup' guy on Medium):

What I really enjoy about Kweku is that he's not an asshole, ever. Like not even a little bit. Even when he's writing about very disturbing things there's something about his voice that's very soothing to me. Not for nothing, I first read him years ago at The Toast.

"The Esquire Man Is Dead. Long Live the Esquire Man" (NYT)
Oh my god, this entire article, which is about the identity crisis in men's magazines (particularly Esquire), made me laugh so hard. Long story short, Esquire is launching a redesign that is surely doomed to fail. Here's the cover from the first issue of the redesign:

My favorite thing about this is how there are not one, not two, but THREE references to peen and yet this still somehow comes off as WIRED for virgins. Here's the EIC on the redesign:

“I look back on what the New Journalism invented, what Gay did, what Tom Wolfe did, what Norman Mailer did. They had to up the literary horsepower with new tools and techniques in order to compete with the speed and seismic shock of one insane event after another in the ’60s and ’70s. We’re just having to do the same thing.”

Yes, yes. I'm really getting all that from "A Hot SEX GUIDE to...the NOVEL!?!" haha, I'm just really looking forward to watching this fail.

"How the Light Gets In" (New Yorker)
In grabbing this link I noticed this article has a different title on the website. I like this one better. Anyway this is David Remnick's profile of Leonard Cohen, published just a few months before Cohen's death late last year. There are so many great moments in this piece. There is Cohen arguing with a grocer about potato salad. There are paragraphs upon paragraphs of cogent analysis of Cohen's songs from Bob Dylan. There is this letter from Cohen to Marianne (the one from the songs), days before her death in July 2016:

He was right; he died a few months later. Man. Man oh man.

But my favorite part was when Cohen described a conversation he had with Bob Dylan in a car many years ago:

"I'm Number Zero." lol

"Meet the Woman Who Helps Humanize Murderers" by Elon Green
Jennifer Wynn is a mitigator: she digs into murderers' pasts for abuse and other circumstances with an endgame of avoiding the death penalty. A lot of this piece is just her discussing some of her most memorable cases:

I love Luis. He was my first full case. So articulate, so forthcoming, so remorseful. Luis admitted to brutally bludgeoning his girlfriend to death with a hammer.

A super fascinating and sad read.

"Sean Spicer's Breitbart Interview Is an Avant-Garde Triumph of Trash Cinema" (AV Club)
An exegesis of a two-minute interview with Sean Spicer that is truly worth your time:

The final three shots will be puzzled over by scholars: Spiering gazing into the camera, half of Spicer’s face, and then a chilling final image as Spiering gazes into some far-off abyss.

I've watched this four times already and bookmarked it for later.
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some stuff I read this week

Over the last however many years I've noticed that I read fewer and fewer books, mainly because I read too much internet. Since the internet is absolutely bonkers right now, which feels like a lot on top of my own personal freakout about everything that's going on, it seems like a good time to focus more on on "real" reading. After giving it some thought I'm setting a little goal for myself to read one non-work book a week, plus one issue in my hoarder pile of New Yorkers. Not impressive, but respectable. I will almost certainly fail.

How many books do normal people read? Normal isn't the right word...I guess I'm really wondering how many books readers read. Curious, I googled around a little and found a Pew study where the line of demarcation was did you read a book last year, or not. One book. Then I saw a Gallup thing where the highest echelon of readers was 11 books/year or more. I definitely read more than that, but I still feel as though I read less than everyone I know?

The idea is that I'll post here on Sundays about whatever book I read, plus anything else that really struck me over the course of the week. And if you'd like to leave a comment about something you read last week, why, I'd like that very much.

Insane Clown President by Matt Taibbi
His new collection of stuff on the 2016 election. I had to read it for work, though I probably would have picked it up on my own (maybe with a little more distance, though). Last year I read some of this stuff in real time, but it's definitely worth revisiting in one big batch. Taking it in this way, my feeling was while the quality of thought was consistently high, I found the writing a bit more uneven than I remembered. Maybe the pieces I had read before were the ones that people circulated most, and therefore the best ones? I don't know, there's this thing I find where that stuff I've read on the Internet collected as a book usually disappoint me. I felt the same way about Samantha Irby's Meaty and Allie Brosch's book a few years back. Those I have some theories as to what went wrong, but I'm less sure what's going on here here. What do I know, Matt Taibbi at his absolute worst is better than anything I'll ever write. Except for, like, there are a couple of chapters in here that are drinking games? Those were pretty bad.

Neither here nor there, but I had somehow never put together or possibly forgot that Taibbi was the guy in charge of Racket. Haha, remember that? Also he's apparently on Bill Maher a lot. Quick question, is Matt Taibbi a nightmare person? I realized when I was working on this book that I don't know much about his persona. Here's an anecdote I just found in his wikipedia:

Journalist James Verini, while interviewing Taibbi in a Manhattan restaurant for Vanity Fair, said Taibbi cursed and threw a coffee at him, then accosted him as he tried to get away, all in response to Verini's volunteered opinion that Taibbi's book, The Exile: Sex, Drugs, and Libel in the New Russia, was "redundant and discursive".

I think this makes me like him more. Back on track.

When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi
This guy was the brother-in-law of a blogger who I've been reading forever, and I'm not too proud to admit that I cried bitter tears when she posted about his death in 2015, and then again when she posted about her twin sister making over the house that she had shared with him. His illness became national news after a couple of essays that would later become this book went viral, and it was weird reconciling that with the happy-looking guy who'd popped up in these posts over the years. Anyway Kalanithi was a neurosurgeon who got nightmare cancer in his mid-30s, and then he died pretty soon thereafter, when his daughter was still a baby. Like if this were a movie it would have Mandy Moore in it, that's how sad this story was.

Kalanithi was one of those people who's good at every fucking thing, but he's likable anyway, which is itself a feat. This was quite a thoughtful book with this dignified zen vibe that is basically the opposite of my entire thing. If I were dying I'd probably just Carrie Mathison-cry and be rude to people. Oh wait, I'm already like that. So that plus I would eat flamin' hot cheetos with every meal.

Perfect title.

"John Cale's Inventive Retrospection" (New Yorker)
Dating back to Sasha Frere-Jones, whose work I really really despise, I have a proud tradition of hating the music dept at the New Yorker. It doesn't really matter who's writing, that stuff is consistently the worst. This caught my eye because it's about John Cale revisiting his old work, "revising" his albums in a way that's sort of like what Kanye's been doing with Life of Pablo. I don't think the stuff she says about the songs themselves is worth a hoot, but there's a lot of other stuff to chew on.

Evidently Cale has been doing this for a while, sort of reorganizing and revising his own legacy. I wasn't aware of this but it just so happens the latest album he fixed up (Fragments of a Rainy Season) is my favorite. (To be fair, I think it's the only John Cale solo album I actually own.) Thinking of albums as living, breathing things instead of a static artifact is itself very interesting, but the fact that it's John Cale in particular speaks to me because one of my most worst opinions is that some of the best Velvet Underground stuff is from their live 1993 reunion album. Cale singing All Tomorrow's Parties is one of my absolute favorites of all time.




A thousand years ago I talked to John Cale at a book signing for his autobiography and he was a real asshole. (And also bright yellow, which was sort of unsettling. I think he had hepatitis, though, so maybe that's what made him mean.) I think that's around when I decided that meeting your heroes is maybe not all it's cracked up to be.

The article also had a great anecdote about Cale's version of "Hallelujah."

These days that song isn't really listenable anymore, but I think Cale was one of the first people to cover it. His version really is stellar. I liked it back in the day. The article referred to a video he released for it a few months ago. It's sorta hacky but there are these shots where worms are crawling over his hands and, later, on his face, and it's a pretty powerful image, this 75yo covered in fucking worms. I think it was shot right before Cohen died? Also the piece mentions this interview where a journalist asked Cale if he was over Lou Reed's death. "Not really," he said. "I don't think that will happen." :(

"Brad Troemel, the Troll of the Internet Art World (New Yorker)  + "Christo, Trump, and the Art World's Biggest Biggest Protest Yet" (NYT)
Technically I read the Christo thing last week, but these two that are worth thinking about together. I probably would have dumped the first one after the first few paragraphs had it not been written by Adrian Chen because Troemel sounds worthless. I'm of an age where, when I really hate a gimmicky artist, I have to stop and ask myself if it's just because I'm old. But Troemel is one of those New Museum types, and I hated the New Museum even when I was a lot younger. His most famous project is literally a tumblr with pictures of a computer in the bathtub?? Whatever.

Christo, on the other hand, is a favorite. Maybe my very favorite. And he just completely burned down a project he's pumped $15 million of his own money into because he hates Trump so much. I hope someone writes a biography on him someday. One time I read this article about his process that said he pops raw garlic cloves all day long as a snack. Gotta imagine it gets weirder from there.

The parts of the Troemel piece I found most interesting were the ones that reminded me of Christo. For ex, Troemel is really interested in creating works that are ephemeral:

He's also interested in making stuff that exists outside of traditional settings like galleries and museums, having the potential to reach passersby instead of people deliberately taking in art:

Art memes. Not sure what I think about that. The article said that, while this was a thing that art people know about, most people who encountered the tumblr had no idea it was this weird concept art. Seems like it would be way cooler to make something that regular people could somehow recognize as art, that sort of made its context strange in the way that Christo's wrapped buildings made you rethink the skyline, the city, what art is, etc.

"Cat Marnell Is Still Alive" (New York Magazine)
Oh my god, this article fucked me up. I think it may be cursed or something. This article is basically The Ring and I have to show it to you so I can move on with my life. I wasn't familiar with Cat Marnell, but she's one of these Internet confessional types. And the piece is written by Emily Gould, who basically invented that. Anyway Marnell's thing is that she's a high-functioning drug addict and she wrote a book about it.  (The excerpt that's with the article is also crazy, but less so. Like if Bret Easton Ellis and William Burroughs wrote a women's magazine.) This is the paragraph from the Gould article that's been haunting me all week:

What the fuck. What in the fucking fuck does that even say. Just when you think it can't get worse there's that meat thermometer??

There are parts of this piece like this that are actually very good writing in the sense Gould undermines her own investment in all those dumb myths that spring up from bad addiction writing--the fake glamorousness, the tendency to make drug addiction sound like some sort of heroic quest, etc. There's this contrast between the Gould piece and Marnell's book excerpt, which is much, much more sanitized (even though her whole thing is supposed to be about being candid about being a mess). But mostly I hate this fucking piece. Emily Gould is one of those women where I feel this sort of carefulness about disliking her, because a lot of people hate her for the wrong reasons. But this is when I decided she's conclusively a garbage person:

"Story arc." Girl, get a soul.

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