Category: Uncategorized
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In Which Alain de Botton Informs Me That Nobody Is Doing the Thing That I’ve Been Doing for the Last 10 Years
In Sunday’s Boston Globe, Alain de Botton says that “It’s Time for an Ambitions New Literature of the Workplace,” and laments that today’s writers have stayed away from the office and thereby betrayed the legacy of the 19th-century greats: It used to be a central ambition of novelists to capture the experience of working life.…
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T*rr*rism
So let me get this straight. Environmentalists who set fires (and don’t hurt anybody) as part of monkeywrenching campaigns get longer prison sentences than your average murderer,* and are called terrorists. But when an anti-abortion wingnut kills a doctor in his church in an avowed effort to scare other people who provide abortions, he’s… Right.…
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The Future Disappoints When It Becomes the Present
Today CNN discovers that the future ain’t what it used to be. What they don’t seem to have noticed is that no future is what it was used to be, because it was never supposed to be that future in any real, predictive sense. Ask any science fiction writer. The key word in the phrase…
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And Wow He Died As Wow He Lived
Over at the Poetry Foundation, GalleyCat’s Jason Boog (with whom I gabbed at NYCC earlier this year) has written a fine article, “And Wow He Died As Wow He Lived,” about one of American poetry’s most undervalued figures, Kenneth Fearing. Check it out. (Also, check out the Complete Poems, published by the University of Maine’s…
Crooked House Fictions 