A blog by Dan Brooks
With a head full of memories and a lung full of unidentified pathogens, Combat! blog returns to Montana today. There is no post to speak of, so how about you read the Personal History that Willy mentioned yesterday? It’s words are like ashes in my mouth, if you kept eating ashes just to figure out what it was that made them so ashy. We’ll be back tomorrow with Friday links, plus probably some kind of upper respiratory infection.
How did I miss this cover?
As a New Yorker subscriber, I am constantly A) reading Talk of the Town pieces from six weeks ago and B) enraged by the stories. The New Yorker is the best place you can publish your short story. Yet The New Yorker story is also its own recognizable brand of lame—the exemplar of what Michael Chabon called the “the contemporary, quotidian, plotless, moment-of-truth revelatory story.” For writers of literary fiction, The New Yorker is Harvard: everybody knows it’s overrated, and everybody wants to get in. I was therefore extremely pleased to read this blog post in which several literary magazines, including The New Yorker, reject a story published in The New Yorker.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xReYMOL8nZY
The best part of this video for the Tea Party Patriots—if you’re going to make me choose—is the way it goes from dystopian fantasy to informative commercial in the last three seconds. The second best part is everything else. From the evocatively-named Development Party, with its eerily familiar emphasis on “progress,” to the vaguely Palin-esque woman gazing contentedly at the shores of liberty before she is kidnapped, this trailer captures everything the Tea Party is about. Specifically: a fantasy of persecution and revolt.
God, I wish you were a phone.
Here in New York, all anyone can talk about is the city’s recent campaign to shame teenagers out of getting pregnant. “Woo!” they say, “St. Patrick’s blleeaarggh!” It’s possible my man-on-the-street survey has been corrupted by outside forces. If the Times is any indication, however, it’s a hot issue. Richard Reeves’s defense of shame as an instrument of social change is compelling, particularly in its citation of how we shamed cigarettes. It seems like a great argument, until you remember that teenagers don’t get pregnant because they think it’s cool. Pregnancy is to smoking as having sex is to catching on fire. If we’re wondering what to do about teen pregnancy, perhaps we might consider a more reliable approach: abortion.
Welcome back, Friday lynx.
Greetings from Aaron’s futon, where I luxuriate in the scorched neurons and sleep-deprived biliousness of late morning in New York City. Obviously, I couldn’t just get in last night and curl up with a cup of chamomile and Right Ho, Jeeves. Back in New York means back in old habits, and I was drinking seven-dollar beers and dramatizing the interior lives of weird strangers until the wee hours of the morning. Now I am tired. Today is Friday, and the charms of the familiar remain as potent as ever. Won’t you clench your stomach and lurch back into the groove with me?