Certain books take up permanent residence on the Suggested Reading table inside every bookstore in the country, as far as I can tell.
Justin Bieber's not so bad.
He's arrogant, you say? What, you mean like Axl Rose and Kanye West? All right. Those guys are monumental douches. Let's go with every Sex Pistol but Paul Cook, pre-Berlin Trilogy Bowie (have a look at this Playboy interview he gave Cameron Crowe, and try to tell me the Thin White Duke doesn't come across as insufferably smug), Jay-Z, and John Lennon. Or Mike Patton or Howard Devoto or Bono. Just pick a front man. Noddy Holder. Robbie Robertson.
A Sense of Direction by Gideon Lewis-Kraus
“Next time, he might skip the Camino [de Santiago], get into the country and pretend for a month that the Internet had never been invented.” –James Campbell, The Wall Street Journal
The Folded Earth by Anuradha Roy
"Roy brings the mountains alive not only in their floral, incandescent glory but also in their moodiness and nonchalance.” –Somebody who just took a sip of coffee and sighed, The New Yorker
May 20
Time to flip that hot cake. It’s getting a little burnt on one side. This week will snap awareness into you—that, shit, you need to flip that flapjack. You’re not too late, and you will find release in the mere action. Now is all about tallying up your dilly-dallying and making resolute steps to check essentials off your to-do list. There is a type of salvation that comes in finding your self lost in the accumulating minutia. But cleaning up your life will sweep clean your mind, and chances are you’ll need your mind for more pressing issues in the near future.
It’s been a crazy few weeks for Chinese President Hu Jintao. First, he had to deal with the scandal surrounding the downfall of a leading politician, Bo Xilai. Then, blind dissident Chen Guangcheng snuck out of house arrest and tried to defect to the United States. Even so, nothing could stop him from taking me stargazing on a beautiful spring night.
ME: I’ve never seen this many stars!
HU: It’s pretty amazing, isn’t it?
ME: I can see the Milky Way!
HU: It’s almost as beautiful as you…
The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson by Robert Caro
“With this fascinating and meticulous account of how and why he did it, Robert Caro has once again done America a great service.” –Bill Clinton, The New York Times
Lives of the Novelists by John Sutherland
“There is a certain amount of biographical boilerplate, but sustained browsing leaves one with the happy feeling that there are no human activities more worthwhile than writing and reading novels.” –A brain in a vat, The New Yorker
While browsing Yelp for something to eat in Chicago recently, we stumbled over a frequent and unusually compelling reviewer named "Harvey H." Unbeknownst to Harvey, we've decided to excerpt and publish his reviews in chronologically-ordered installments. Read Vol. I, Vol. II, Vol. III, and Vol. IV to catch up.
Neighborhood: University Village
I took the bus to get to New York and find Noelle. I figured an airplane might flag police and I gotta stay under the radar, ya know?
The greyhound, is, well, a bus I guess. When you are traveling super long distances it feels like a bus.
Though highway 80 is beautiful in Pennsylvania. Everybody should drive through those rolling hills at some point in their life. I wanted to just jump out of the bus and roll.
But it was still a greyhound. There was a lady next to me eating cheese puffs and using the same napkin to wipe her ands and blow her nose. That napkin was her pants. Yes, she was blowing her nose on her pants.
But I'm in New York now and ready to find Noelle. I have no idea what to do now.
Harvey out.
In beauty, in dignity of purpose, the fan is the cousin of the umbrella, distant progeny, both, of the coat hanger, the stairs, the doorknob.
In winter, the fan stays in the closet, on a high shelf, daydreaming and planning and daydreaming again. It is the familiar of the two Victorian raconteurs, the picnic basket and the tennis racquet.
In summer, the long gestation of thought is rewarded and the fan arrives daily, diligently, at the desk, to write its endless novel of the afternoon, whom it loves as a man loves a woman who is always standing behind him.
Its motions are deliberate, and because of this, it understands, it appreciates, patience. Fans do not like to turn quickly. The greatest joy of a fan is to turn slowly, and in turning slowly, to be allowed to feel. It is in love; it wants to miss nothing.
Our regular Polidicks columnist, David Z. Morris, is currently, like most of the educating machines employed by state universities, trying to avoid being crushed to death by teetering piles of exams and essays. Luckily, we received this unsolicited guest submission to fill his column space. Since this was a last-minute substitution, we have not had much time to screen for quality, but a quick run-through seemed to confirm that it meets David’s usual standards.
Hello, my name is Tomas James. (Not Thomas Jane, the actor who plays the Punisher—though I have been told we have similar physiques! Haha!) I have been reading this column since it started, and though I can’t agree with everything David Z. Morris has to say (for example, I own quite a bit of gold that I keep in my basement), I have great admiration for his willingness to say them forthrightly. I think it is an important trait for Americans to cultivate, and it sickens me to watch our politicians speaking out of both sides of their mouths. In particular, it has made me very angry recently to see members of the Republican Party, supposed defenders of free markets and American success, attack one another for acting boldly in the creative destruction that powers capitalism! Again David and I do not see eye to eye on this, because he is a Leftist and apparently enjoyed watching this self-destruction, but nonetheless, his analysis was spot-on.
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