Thank You For America!
Clichés are clichés for a reason, or so the adage goes. The same can be said for stereotypes. We hosted a foreign exchange student back in high school: you could’ve pulled him out of an 80’s movie. At 17 he had a full beard and his fondness for Poison, jeans and American flag jackets arrived straight from the mind of John Hughes. Regardless, understanding American boys is difficult, which is why so many scholarly investigations on the topic remain pertinent. See The Chronicle of Higher Education for details. Onward, we go from watching reality TV in a pharmacy to addressing Facebook’s friending phenomenon, and then to Joan Didion, whose work, depending on how you read it, either serves as one cliché after another or a matronly premonition for the young literati. Speaking of clichés, what does it take to write about writing from a foreign place? The Stranger surmises. Finally, authors writing essays is a regular happening — Zadie Smith explores why. Our judgment? Thumbs up! – Andrew Geer
– My son just turned 3. He loves trains, fire trucks, tools of all kinds, throwing balls, catching balls, spinning until he falls down, chasing cats, tackling dogs, emptying the kitchen drawers of their contents, riding a tricycle, riding a carousel, pretending to be a farmer, pretending to be a cow, dancing, drumming, digging, hiding, seeking, jumping, shouting, and collapsing exhausted into a Thomas the Tank Engine bed wearing Thomas the Tank Engine pajamas after reading a Thomas the Tank Engine book. — American Boys in The Chronicle of Higher Education
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– I was recently in a Duane Reade drugstore, having a Hamlet fit of temporizing over which moisturizer to choose, when the normal tedium pervading the aisles was suddenly rent by the ranting distress of a young woman in her early 20s, pacing around and fuming into her cell phone. She made no effort to muffle her foulmouthed monologue, treating everyone to a one-sided tale of backstabbing betrayal—“She pretended to be my friend and shit all over me”—as mascara ran down her cheeks like raccoon tears. — Reality TV in Vanity Fair
– Before Facebook, few of us asked others, explicitly, to be our friends. We didn’t monitor how many friends we had as an indication of our status or scroll through listings of friends of friends to pad our own list. — Social Networking in The City Journal
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– It was 13 degrees outside. The winter light was piercing on the western side of Park Avenue. I had on two sweaters under my wool coat, a pair of leggings under my jeans, and winter boots with fur trim up to my knees. An ill-fitting knit hat scratched at my forehead and my sunglasses sat cold on my nose. — Joan Didion in The Morning News
– People who move from the East Coast to the Pacific Northwest have to bear a certain kind of pain as they acclimate to the region’s peculiarities. You’ve seen the traits caricatured again and again: Everybody moves slower here, the passive-aggressiveness is stultifying, and you could choke to death on all the second-guessing. — Pacific Agony in The Stranger
– Why do novelists write essays? Most publishers would rather have a novel. Bookshops don’t know where to put them. It’s a rare reader who seeks them out with any sense of urgency. Still, in recent months Jonathan Safran Foer, Margaret Drabble, Chinua Achebe and Michael Chabon, among others, have published essays, and so this month will I. And though I think I know why I wrote mine, I wonder why they wrote theirs, and whether we all mean the same thing by the word “essay”, and what an essay is, exactly, these days. — Zadie Smith in The Guardian
Video: Interview with Zadie Smith
