In the wake of Knausgaard’s My Struggle, it would be easy to pull a Person of the Year and inaugurate “the self” as the exemplary character of contemporary narrative. But this maneuver would too readily stoke the rage that lies beneath the widespread claim that we are all narcissists now.
This room is like an oven tonight — or I would not be so generous in the matter of margins.
A: I will admit I had to be told don’t ever use torture— B: —Well, to torture in the cold light of day… A: —but I didn’t think it was offensive regardless. B: You didn’t think it was offensive? They have wives. … Continued
If Rilke’s poetry has any relevance to twenty-first century Americans, it’s because we worry, now more than ever, that we are losing unmediated experience. We’re busy, we’re sleepless, we’re medicated, and we’re marooned in the everyday.
I’ll never be able to hold you again. So I fear. But I really don’t fear. It looks like snow. Nothing can surprise me.
With this spiritual nosegay I declare myself your happy and insouciant Kentucky friend, and nowonder Henry Miller says I look like an ex-con and like him and like Genet. Actually, though, it is only Picasso I look like which is deceptive: he got money.
When does slang die? Is it when your mom sends you a link to a TIME.com definition of “bae”? When “shade” becomes a Jeopardy question? When “selfie” beats “twerk” for word of the year? These words have become so removed from their original contexts that the begin to lose their meaning, or at least some of their value. After all, isn’t one of the primary functions of slang to identify the speaker as a member of the community? I don’t care how many episodes of RuPaul’s Drag Race your cool mom has seen, she does not throw shade in quite the way the queens of Paris is Burning do.
Do you remember when we all we worried about was love?
Where in this frame is the duck? And it’s not for nothing: the insane onslaught of visual gags, puns, Alex Trebek-cameos and historical nonsenses really do render the video more effective.
To the gentle children and the sons of wrath, to those with flowers in their eyes, of sorrow or of sickness, a tender adieu.
