Personal Essays
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>The pain is always the high
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Jay Caspian Kang on his addiction to gambling @ The Morning News.
On one of those steel-skied Manhattan winter mornings, when it seems like the city is encased by a slow-moving ironclad, I was sitting in the backseat of a Mercedes Benz, eating a hot dog with two new friends. Exactly 44 $100 bills lay folded up in my wallet. I’d just met these two friends, both of whom had seen me pocket the cash, but I wasn’t much nervous. If they robbed me, I would see them again soon enough. As it happened, both were nice kids from Westchester County. I knew nothing about Westchester County except for the stigma that kids from Westchester act tougher than they are. My friends acknowledged the stigma and spent half an hour arguing over which was the more important debut, Eminem’s The Slim Shady EP or Biggie Smalls’s Ready to Die. I really listened, made a case for Nas’s Illmatic, and felt happy for the first time in months. After we finished the hot dogs, the kids drove me 20 blocks uptown and dropped me off in front of my apartment. I thanked them, walked up to my studio, and fell asleep.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )During my last semester in graduate school, I made a lot of unexpected friends. I’d meet them in the card room above the OTB on 72nd and Broadway, or I’d meet them over Recession Specials at the Gray’s across the street, or I’d meet them in the poker pit at the Tropicana, or I’d sit next to them on the 5 a.m. bus from Atlantic City, trying not to think about what it meant that these were the only sunrises we saw anymore—the washed-out sun peeking out over the white, industrial cylinders of north New Jersey. My friends and I never really talked about anything. Mostly, we muttered about the bad beats we’d taken, each new friend a companion in losing. Sometimes, they would talk about the tits on some female dealer and we’d all smile in recognition. Once, an old Saudi man who sat to my left in a 5-5 No Limit Hold ‘em Game at the New York Players Club told me that he missed the openness of the Middle East. When I started to laugh, he said he was talking about the flatness of the earth and the architecture, not the people. Occasionally I admitted to being a graduate student. Although I must have met more than 50 of these friends, I only remember telling one of them about my dream of becoming a novelist. He was a Filipino kid about my age from Queens, and when I made my confession in the back seat of a cab driving to a game he knew about in Chelsea, he only said, “What’s the book going to be about? Hold ‘em, Stud, or Omaha?”
>This is why the humanities are withering away
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Chris Hedges @ Truth Dig critiques the limits and dangers of an entertainment culture and a world lost in screens.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Nemesis was the Greek goddess of retribution. She exacted divine punishment on arrogant mortals who believed they could defy the gods, turn themselves into objects of worship and build ruthless systems of power to control the world around them. The price of such hubris was almost always death.
Nemesis, related to the Greek word némein, means “to give what is due.” Our nemesis fast approaches. We will get what we are due. The staggering myopia of our corrupt political and economic elite, which plunder the nation’s wealth for financial speculation and endless war, the mass retreat of citizens into virtual hallucinations, the collapsing edifices around us, which include the ecosystem that sustains life, are ignored for a giddy self-worship. We stare into electronic screens just as Narcissus, besotted with his own reflection, stared into a pool of water until he wasted away and died.
We believe that because we have the capacity to wage war we have the right to wage war. We believe that money, rather than manufactured products and goods, is real. We believe in the myth of inevitable human moral and material progress. We believe that no matter how much damage we do to the Earth or our society, science and technology will save us. And as temperatures on the planet steadily rise, as droughts devastate cropland, as the bleaching of coral reefs threatens to wipe out 25 percent of all marine species, as countries such as Pakistan and Bangladesh succumb to severe flooding, as we poison our food, air and water, as we refuse to confront our addiction to fossil fuels and coal, as we dismantle our manufacturing base and plunge tens of millions of Americans into a permanent and desperate underclass, we flick on a screen and are entranced.
>Lost in the wild
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| Henri Cartier-Bresson |
Emma Stockman meditates on the photographs of Henri Cartier-Bresson and the attraction of escape @ Anderbo.
I walk from room to room through the Museum of Modern Art in midtown Manhattan, headphones in my ears to block out the sounds of footsteps behind me, keeping out the awkward shuffling silences of many standing bodies, allowing me to remain unaware of the subtle social pressures one feels at a museum to stop, think a profound thought, and then move on.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Today I came here alone, so there’s no one to care how long I stand still, finally finding something worth pausing for: the photographs of Henri Cartier-Bresson. These are the kinds of pictures I go to when I am in one of those creative funks where even the cherry blossoms on the trees in Washington Square Park have become mundane; these are the kinds of images I rely on to jump-start my head, like electrically charged medical paddles I could use to shock my brain back into thought; these are the imagined moments that I cling to, documented for me by a man who lived some sixty years before I was even breathing, approximately seventy-seven years before I would know the kind of romantic boredom that makes the world look at once smaller and larger than it ever has before.
>Margin Comments: Framing the Self
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Laurence Ross considers the relationship between essay writing and drinking and the pleasures of artifice @ Brevity:
My instinct here is to write about the alcohol and not the writing. My instinct is to write a small essay peppered with personal anecdote—about how as a child I cherished the maraschinos out of my grandfather’s manhattans, about my love of altar wine initiated by my first holy communion, about the time I stood on a barstool and sang La Marseillaise to an intimate crowd of strangers in Baltimore in exchange for a martini. But no, I will keep myself on track, despite the fact that writing about my own writing makes me uneasy.
When I drink, it is simultaneously a private and public act, so perhaps it is especially appropriate that this essay is simultaneously a private and a public letter. There is the audience (Karen) and then there is the audience (the unknown reader).
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )When I drink, it is simultaneously a private and public act, because there is always someone watching, even if that someone is only me. There is a self-consciousness that goes along with each cocktail. I pay attention to the way in which I hold my glass. I posture. And then there is the fact that I am watching others and others are watching me. I watch their eyes move to my glass. I watch them notice the level of my drink just as I notice the level of theirs.
>Body Parts
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| “L’evidence éternelle” by René Magritte |
Three essays that explore questions about our bodies and humanness.
Suzanne Menghraj wonders “What does the disembodied head say to the world, to passersby, to itself?” at Guernica.
Thomas White asks “Are dolphins so advanced that they should be considered nonhuman “persons?”” in The Philosophers’ Magazine.
Kati Nolfi writes about food and bodies and wonders “What do we really hate when we hate fat?” at The Smart Set.
And at The Millions J.P. Smith reflects on all those things we bury as we go through the years: “along the way I was going to reveal more about myself and my own experiences than I’d ever done before. I own up to crimes and lapses both real and moral: things I’d thought I’d forgotten; things I’d done that I’d allowed to sink into the mud of oblivion. Until now. My backpack is all the lighter for it. My conscience is clear. And my backyard is a damned mess. I’m still digging up bodies.”
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