I am loath to write a candid critique of Marie Calloway’s “Adrien Brody” because I don’t know what good it does me — as a person, and as a female writer — to castigate a woman who is writing about sex in a confessional way.  Only, here is the thing: by writing what she has, not only has Calloway done little good for women, but she has done absolutely no good for writers, and people in general.

Much has been made of whether or not the story is a new-wave feminist statement.  The first bone I feel like picking is with the New York Observer, for every introducing the F-word ito this particular conversation.  The title of their Calloway profile is “The New Model for Literary Seductress is Part Feminist, Part ‘Famewhore’ and All Pseudonymous.”  Then, the piece makes no mention of how exactly Calloway can stand in for “Feminist” in a pixilated, online world; but rather, outlines the wake of tirades, gossip, and accolades that followed the publication of “Adrien Brody.”

I only ever took one Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies course in college.  I’ve never worn a “slutty [insert blue collar profession, beloved cartoon, or common household item here]” Halloween costume.  I did, however, once participate in a burlesque performance attended mostly by fraternity brothers.  But I’ve also read “A Cyborg Manifesto.”  I don’t purport to be an authority on feminism.  I do purport to be a writer, and a good person.  And, with her story, Marie Calloway is flying in the face of literature and ethics.

I know what makes a good story.  Between undergraduate workshops, On Writing volumes from some of my favorite authors, and the MFA I’m currently pursuing, I pay way too much to find out what makes a good story.  All the while, I subconsciously already know the answers, but I’ll cough up more and more money to have it hammered into my head so that maybe I can figure out how to do it myself.

Every story must have conflict.

A really good story has a beginning, middle, and end.  And the reader feels that something has changed over the course of the narrative.

Sympathetic characters and a compelling setting with make a story extra-good.

And, ideally, all of us writers would like to feel like we are making the world a better place through our writing.  Throwing some beautiful glitter on the wall and hoping it sticks.

Finally, particularly when the medium is print, a writer should have a really good reason for telling a story.  For killing a tree.  Or, in the case of online literature, for asking a reader for a few precious minutes of their short life.

To quote on of my heroes, Amy Hempel, and put it bluntly, “If you don’t have anything to say, then I think you shouldn’t say it.”

Calloway bills her story as fiction but I’m positive that none of it is made up.  In its first incarnation, it used the real name of the man since dubbed Adrien Brody.  I can’t forget this while I’m reading it.  It is a play-by-play account of an affair, with no character development, no figurative language, no heart-stopping details, no beginning, middle, or end, and no revelation.

Infidelity.  Voyeurism.  Loneliness.  Sexuality.  Humiliation.  These are big themes, but without a narrative arch or likable characters, these ideas just float in the air like neon signs on a dark city street.  Calloway relies on the painstaking dictation of exactly what is said and done at any moment to relay her message.  The two lovers discuss Tao Lin and Bebe Zeva, they listen to U2, and they reference Sasha Grey.  The protagonist quips that her personal brand is “really well developed”; but its no joke.  The only leg this story has to stand on is a personal brand that Calloway and other young internet writers have cultivated, and that readers have subscribed to and adopted as their own.  For those who are not between the ages of eighteen and twenty four, who do not care about being perceived as hip, and who do not read Thought Catalog religiously, this story has no resonance.  Calloway writes away from the emotion.  She simply does not have the literary chops to create a real story, with stakes, and a sense of humanity.  Does she not realize that a man who talks about Gramsci during sex is a two-dimensional epithet (particularly meaningless if you don’t know who Gramsci is)?  Or that a Jill Sobule song playing over a speaker is not effective scene-setting for those who have never heard the song?  Or that a woman who cannot even recognize her own desires or ambitions is not a heroine we can identify with?

So, I’m left wondering what I was meant to take away from this story.  What is Marie Calloway trying to tell?  She is incredibly self-conscious, dropping lines like, “I felt annoyed he was only focused on his own feelings, after he had just shot a load on my face,” and, “Do you think  I’m pretty?”  But for somebody so hyper aware of her effect on men, her internet presence, and her reflection in a mirror, Calloway seems to know nothing of what her writing means, or what it means to be twenty-something.

And as for her assertion that she wrote to express her “worldview/subjectivity” because “it seemed that nobody had any idea,” I would urge her to Wikipeida Joyce Maynard.

Marie Calloway propositioned an older man she’d just met for sex, and I have a strong suspicion she did it just so she could write about it: meaning, she decided on how her story would end, before the experience even happened.  So, how could she have learned from it?  And, if it was so predictable, how could it even be a good story?  I’ll say it again, if you don’t have anything to say, you shouldn’t say it.  But you also shouldn’t orchestrate a contrived situation in hopes of gaining something to say.

We’ve all made bad decisions.  In fact, part of my detest for this piece may have to do with the unfortunate similarities I see between myself and Marie Calloway.  Yet, I’ve realized the meaningless flotsam of my most selfish and self-destructive years is not the stuff that brilliant fiction is made of.  That’s not to say that young people’s experiences don’t have value; they do.  But valuable experiences actually feel valuable.  You can tell they’re worth writing about.  They are heavy like gold, and hard like diamonds, and they shine and they are precious and unforgettable.  “Adrien Brody” is symptomatic of a larger disease.  Thought Catalog, Muumuuhouse, and many other internet platforms are afflicted by this disease.  Rather than searching for gems, or throwing glitter on the wall, rather than digging up difficult truths and honest revelations, young writers are cumming all over their stomachs and hoping it spells out words.  Ironically, Adrien, came all over Marie’s face and was probably hoping it wouldn’t be written about on the internet, which brings me to the issue of ethics.

In the body of the “short story,” Calloway asks to take Adrien’s picture.  He asks if she is going to put it on the internet, and she replies “no” while revealing to the reader that she fully intends to put it on the internet.  I’m not bothered by the fact that Calloway slept with Adrien, though she knew he had a girlfriend, for the betrayal in that case rests on his conscience.  However, she detailed these transgressions, perhaps hoping that the girlfriend would see.

When I was in eighth grade, I had this really cute boyfriend named Josh.  One weekend, I went out of town on a ski trip with my family.  While I was gone, another girl in my class invited Josh over to her house to engage in open mouth kissing and heavy petting.  She made sure to tell all of my friends about it on AIM so that, when I returned home, I was sure to find out.  If this girl had printed out those AIM conversations, would we celebrate them as quality fiction?

I fail to see the moral distinction between these two scenarios.

And lastly, there’s the fact that Marie Calloway makes me embarrassed and ashamed to be a female writer in my twenties.  This is personal, will not hold up in critical court, and is an issue I’ll simply work out in therapy or through collage.  But it’s the truth.  Plenty of people have come to Calloway’s defense, saying that there should be a place for young women to write frankly about sex, or that she exhibits obvious talent.  I have to disagree.  Karen Russell would be an example of a person who makes me proud to be a female writer in my twenties.  And, of course, there are many slightly older women who write frankly about sex in an elegant and awe-inspiring way: Kate Christensen, Helen Schulman, Jami Attenberg.  I simply worry that if we continue to celebrate the Aderall-fueled, tit-flashing, brand-wearing that “Adrien Brody” exemplifies, we have less space for the truly remarkable literary labors of love.  Wipe away the cum, and make some room for the glitter.

Editor’s Note: You may have noticed a significant lapse in posting on this blog.  It’s due partly to the fact that I’ve grown disillusioned with the internet and neglected it in favor of focusing on fiction.  Ironically, it took a narcissistic “literary” internet personality to drag me out of hibernation.

How we should be spending our summer: like Hemingway

I hold the summer reading list sacred because so many of my favorite books came to me that way.  Back in high school, summer reading lists were how I first read The Remains of the Day and The Sun Also Rises and The English Patient, my all-time favorite book, the book that convinced me there might be wildness and feeling in the world worth growing up for.  I never would have known to choose it if wasn’t assigned–the penis like a seahorse on the first page was just the first romantic gloss to freak me out–but that list brought me into parts of myself that I hadn’t known were missing.

I’ve tried to build my own summer reading lists every year since then when I haven’t had one assigned.  I aim for some sort of thematic unity; this year, I’ve been reading things bound up in plot since I decided I plot is my own writing weakness.  But really, I wish someone else would write a list for me. 

So let me write a list for you.  Probably, your time for lazing and loafing is less than you’d like, but procrastinating and last-minute reading in the back of the car on the family road trip is part of the summer reading game, and to make things especially easy for you, I’ll keep it short.  Real short.  All the items on this list are short stories, so you can dawdle and put them off as long as you like and still have the sweet, sweet pleasure of crossing them off of a list.  I present for your consideration, the Truly Short Summer Reading List, which not coincidentally is a list of my top 5 Stories of All Time:

1.)  “The Barber’s Unhappiness,” George Saunders (in the collection Pastoralia)
2.) “Why I Live at the P.O.,” Eudora Welty (in The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty)
3.) “Haunting Olivia,” Karen Russell (in St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves)
4.) “How to Become a Writer,” Lorrie Moore (in Self-Help)
5.) “The Comforts of Home,” Flannery O’ Connor

And go read The English Patient, too.
–Emma Komlos-Hrobsky

*Who else was read this as the diversity book-of-the-week in elementary school and was problematically jazzed about the idea of finding beauty in urban grit and escaping the squalor of city living via container gardening?

Sylvia Plath's house on Chalcot Square

I was less sure that a pilgrimage to my other writing holy site, the house of Sylvia Plath, would work out so well.  Frieda Hughes talks about the cult of her mother as “suicide doll,” that reverence she receives for the facts of her life and death rather than her writing that seems to propel so many Plath admirers.  Plath’s grave has been repeatedly defaced by these fans, the “Hughes” of her last name chipped off or otherwise obscured.  (I understand the impulse, but not the act.)  I was afraid that when I saw her house it would be similarly arrayed with what would feel to me like the wrong kind of offerings or pronouncements.  This is a fear that’s proprietary of Plath in ways I know aren’t right, that are one more sign of the strangeness of my work on her work.  I want to visit her house while I lament the people who love her solely for her life story; I want to distance myself from the people who seem to love her without knowing her, which is of course how I’ll always be stuck loving her, too.

But when I got to make my Plath pilgrimage two weeks ago while visiting another dear friend in London, there were no traces of groupies to be seen.  My friend showed me not only Plath’s final house at 23 Fitzroy Road, but the house literally around the corner where she’d once lived with Ted Hughes.  This earlier house on Chalcot Square (above) receives official commemoration as a Plath site by way of a blue plaque next to the window.  No mention is made of Hughes. While untidy garbage on the lawn left something to be desired, the purple paint and arched bushes had a sweetness that’s not what I think of with Plath; it’s almost a comfort to know there was a time when this was the house she chose, purple paint job exigent then or not.

23 Fitzroy Road, third from left

The flat at 23 Fitzroy Road has a plaque, too, but it is in honor of Yeats.  Yeats lived there as a boy, and Plath moved into the house’s upper two floors hoping that its poetic past would bring her luck.  Instead, she ended her life here on February 11, 1963.

There were no offerings at the house, no bouquets or poems or notes, no sign at all to say this house was ever hers.  The street has taken in that history and forgotten it, folded it up and away.  It now stands still.   Those two top windows look out on nothing.  If you came to Fitzroy Road innocent, you’d never know she’d ever been here.  This is the best memorial I can think of for Plath–a void in the heart of Primrose Hill.

–Emma Komlos-Hrobsky

I was eccentric and obsessed with aesthetics.

In adolescence, I was obsessed with fashion magazines. It wasn’t unusual for me to spend about $70 a month on them. Now, I wish I had saved all that donut peddling (my first job was working as a waitress at a breakfast diner with about twenty four varieties of homemade donuts) money to use for, you know, like, food. But I didn’t.

At a certain age, though, I realized I would probably never own the Marc Jacobs dresses and Louboutin pumps featured in ElleGirl and TeenVOGUE. But, I probably will decorate a beautiful house someday. Home decor is just a different kind of fashion.

Still, until very recently, my idea of interior decorating was deciding whether to put my Robert Downy Jr poster collection on the wall next to my bed so it’s like we’re lying beside one another, or on the ceiling above my bed, so he’s the first thing I see when I wake up.

This newfound passion (decorating, not RDJ, there’s nothing new about my passion for RDJ) can be attributed to any and all of the following:
1. Working, however, briefly, on The Nate Berkus Show, learning what “floating” furniture meant, and meeting and delighting in this woman.
3. I’m becoming my mother. She has exquisite taste.
4. While working on The Smurfs Movie, we had the most incredible set decorating department. They were all so talented. Particularly, my friend who was the set decorating PA had an amazing eye. She took me to her apartment and I instantly fell in love with everything she’d done to the space (not to mention, several kickass pieces she inherited from the sets of past jobs). Ever since then I have thought of interior decorating as a serious fine art.
5. My ever-growing obsessions with the worlds of certain movies and television shows, and my desire to physically enter those worlds (Clueless, Double Indemnity, Twin Peaks, Mad Men…). My love of film and television has fueled a new interest in design.
6. I’m getting older.
7. I’m moving!

So, since I spend a sick amount of time on decorating blogs, and trolling Etsy. I may post some ideas, ongoing projects, or inspiration here.

I feel uncomfortably domestic. Kind of like this lady.

In fact, seeing this photo inspired a very wacky decorating idea on my part. I have this old dollhouse at my parents’ house in Cape Cod that I used to love but now, obviously (or maybe not so obviously), nobody uses.
Without actually being able to get my hands on it yet, I am trying to decide if I think it would make an awesome and quirky or just plain dumb and stupid storage solution.
The dollhouse looks something like this…

And my thought was to fill it with something like these paper drawers from the container store…

Another thought was cigar boxes, or small spice jars.  Thoughts?

WHAT WERE YOU DOING WHEN YOU WERE 23?
Intern Madeline is turning 23! Here’s what some of our other contributors were doing when they were 23. (Playing packed shows with “The Crash Test Dummies” is a real answer.)


The contributing staffers range pretty widely in age and flavor, but the one thing their stories all have in common is that they all have the sweet and sour aftertaste of gleeful ignorance, vague, sleepy nostalgia, and bad decisions. Talking about being 23 tastes like that day-glo orange sauce Chinese food restaurants give you to dip your eggrolls in.  So icky and so good. And so bad for your heart. And, just like thinking back on being 23, if you lift up a little plastic container of that sauce, and look through it, it gives everything a dreamy, orange tint like what movies use to show memories!

As soon as I read the piece on xoJane, I thought to myself, What was I doing when I was twenty three? I was immediately flooded with a hundred smells and sounds evocative of three hundred sixty five blurry days spent in Greenpoint and East Williamsburg, Brooklyn. I smiled as I thought back. Wondered, Who was that crazy kid? Felt my heart shuffle quickly shut like a flipbook as I recalled a few of the more shameful moments of my twenty third year.
Then I remembered, Oh wait, I’m only twenty four. And I’ve only been twenty four for three months.
So, why does thinking about twenty three feel all faux retro and bittersweet, like watching Almost Famous?
The reason why these stories of being twenty three are so evocative is because, even if you are twenty three, no matter what you’re doing already seems like it’s in the past, because that’s how insane and ethereal this age is. Your life basically becomes a great story the instant it’s being lived and, even only twelve months later, it will seem like a million years ago. You will fall in and out of love so quickly, that affairs will whiz by with the noise and aggravation of a downtown 5 train that decides not to stop at Union Square that day. You will do a lot of things so awful that you will find it necessary to begin repressing the memories of doing them the second they’re done. You will dream that your roommate asked you to buy cream cheese. When you bring it home and she looks at you quizically, you will swear up and down on your turtle’s backyard shoebox grave that she asked you to buy it. When she says, When?, you will be unable to provide a clear answer. She will make the salient point that you guys don’t have any bagels, so what you put the cream cheese on? You feel it’s worth noting that cream cheese on Wheat Thins is a really good snack, but that is beside the point. Then remember that, in the dream, she was donning a hat with a peacock feather in it. Not only does she not own a hat like that, but wearing one would be uncharacteristic of her personal brand. Your life is dream-like. You will wear a lot of vintage clothes. All the pictures you took that year, you took with Hipstamatic, so they look older than they actually are. There’s also the fact that you’ve figured out how to make $10 last a whole week, which makes you feel like it’s 1938.

When I was 23, I lived in a third floor walk-up where we had to throw the keys out the window to let people in. The man who owned the bodega downstairs always called me “mami” and his sixteen year old son once invited me to a party I actually considered going to, but the thought of all that un-squandered youth and potential in one space, and all those people who didn’t have to pay rent, was too overwhelming and I chickened out . I occupied one of the four bedrooms. I was friends with the girl I shared a wall with. Once, to avoid interacting with anybody else in the apartment, I climbed out my window, across the fireplace, and into her window, just so we could lie on the bed and watch Felicity together.

When I was 23, I made out with a lot of bartenders. They all went to art school and three of them had tattoos that incorporated dinosaurs.

When I was 23, it was the law to drink bloody marys on weekends.  The really hot waitress, with the faux Hermes print tap shorts, knew us at Lokal on Manhattan and Driggs.  I always ordered a grilled veggie panini.  My roommate always got eggs benedict.  Two bloody marys, one Diet coke, two waters, s’il-vous-plait.  Once when we were sitting on the patio there, we saw the cutest dog walk by.  We both squealed, “Doggie!” and reached out to pet it.  Only after the dog had passed did we realize that its collar was attached to a leash that was in the hand of Josh Harnett.

When I was 23, I spent a lot of time in the park. Whole days would go by where we would do nothing but laze on the grass and watch hotties roll by on their fixed gear bikes. Turkey’s Nest on the corner that lets you take out margaritas in giant styrofoam cups. You need to drink enough so that you stop feeling like bugs are crawling up your skirt. My friend also once said, very wisely, that Turkey’s Nest is a really great bar to go to if you need to be the prettiest girl in the room.  I had a lot of friends that were in softball leagues or kickball leagues, so there was always some kind of game going on. On weekends there’s a farmer’s market where they sell the most amazing strawberry juice you’ve ever tasted. I read all of The Secret History by Donna Tartt sitting on a bench in that park. I would also always see people I recognized from their OKCupid profiles.

When I was 23, I dated a guy who used an old t-shirt as pillowcase.

When I was 23, I worked seventy hours a week and still felt like going out after work.

When I was 23, I thought I wanted to work at a magazine.

When I was 23, I worked at a magazine and realized that’s pretty much the last thing I ever want to do.

When I was 23, it was all about La Roux.

When I was 23, I had what I hope will be my last friend break-up because, seriously, I’m getting too old for that shit.

When I was 23, we had a birthday party that was Alice in Wonderland themed. I bought a purple plastic top hat at Party City in the Flatiron district. I look at the pictures and I don’t know anybody that was there.

When I was 23, I knew all the bars. Daddy’s, Enid’s, Matchless, Sweet-Ups, Royal Oak, Duck Duck, Trash Bar, Beauty Bar, The Levee, Harefield Road, Legion, Union Pool, Macri Park, The Woods, K&M, Savala’s, The Cove. Now I know this: reading and drinking Prosecco on my couch is way cheaper and way more fun.

When I was 23, I went to one play the whole year, and I felt really cultured.

When I was 23, New York was all about rompers, drinks with elderberry in them, and Momofuku Milk Bar crack pies.

When I was 23, no matter how much I cleaned, my room felt dusty.

Here are the things I never had in the apartment at 23: paper towels, tissues, Zip Loc bags, Neosporin, bottled water, fresh fruit… bagels, or cream cheese.

When I was 23, my friends woke me up at 7 AM to tell me we were going to Jones Beach. I slept the whole way there in the back of my friend’s van. We bought Smirnoff Ice and “iced” each other (that was a thing). My roommate got lobster-grade sunburnt. When we got home, she filled the tub with ice and cold water and sat in it. I took pictures of her sitting in the frigid tub, drinking a Coors Lite, her eyes wet with tears.

When I was 23, I applied to grad school.

When I was 23, I went to see Snoop Dogg in concert. The concert started at 8 PM. I waited until 1 AM but, he still hadn’t come on stage and I had to be at work at 6 in the morning, so I left.

When I was 23, I skipped my five year high school reunion.

When I was 23, I liked to go sit on my roof, listen to music, and daydream about an age when I would know anything about anything.

It is the rare author who is pursuing his craft as a way to unwind between film projects.  (The exception, of course, is James Franco.) An alarming number of writers who one suspects turned to writing to avoid having to speak out loud, ever, seem to get cajoled into reading the back copy off their books in hushed tones while posed somewhere in their natural habitat–before their desk perhaps, where they slaved over their manuscript for seven years before having it zombie-fied by their 23-year-old editor, or standing in the neon glow of their refrigerator while eating away the pain, or walking to the mailbox to send off that bankruptcy paperwork.

Authors haven’t been bred for this trailer stuff any more than their books have, which is really the bigger problem.  Trying to stage the pleasures of a book in the medium of video means emphasis ends up on plot rather than voice or language, plus cheesecake shots of the author with their cats.

This isn’t to say that these freaky book trailer lovechildren aren’t lovable.  It’s just that we often love them for the wrong reasons, in the way we might feel a sort of tenderness for the troubled squirrel that throws himself into our sliding glass door again and again and again.  (I have a specific trailer or twelve in mind here, but who am I to cast aspersions?  I’ll just say that YouTubing “Chelsea Boy” will be well worth your time.)

This isn’t also to say that there aren’t trailers that are genuinely funny or evocative.   See, for example, the Super Sad True Love Story trailer, which makes excellent use of a whole slew of authors and includes a stellar performance from the ever-sassy Mary Gaitskill.  This is the closest I’ve seen to a trailer that can give the honey badger video a run for its money.

Tonight, the 2nd Annual Moby Awards will be celebrating both the successful book trailer and its paste-eating siblings.  If you’re in New York, come out TONIGHT, June 2nd, to PowerHouse Arena from 8-10.  There will be booze.  There will celebrity judges.  There will a be golden sperm whale statue going home for Most Annoying Performance by an Author–and who doesn’t want to see if Jonathan Franzen will be this year’s Jonathan Safran Foer?  Check out all the details here.  Formal attire encouraged.

–Emma Komlos-Hrobsky

P.S. Bonus points if you knew this post’s title came from Moby-Dick.

In some ways she’s right. Egan’s depiction of a post-Haight-Renaissance San Francisco as a pulsing tumor of punk, devouring the city from the center out, is quite spectacular — all green mohawks and cocaine bumps. But even if you weren’t there…
…even if you’re too old or too young for punk to mean anything to you…
…if you’ve never been to California…
…even if you’ve never owned music in the physical sense, a record or a CD, something you could scratch and break in half…
…the book will still resonate. Because it isn’t really about rock n’ roll.

Egan herself admits, in the Acknowledgments at the back of the book, that she knew very little about the music industry, past or present, before undertaking this project: “For their expertise in fields of which I knew little or less, thanks to Alex Busansky, Alexandra Egan, Ken Goldberg, Jacob Slichter (for his book, So You Wanna Be a Rock & Roll Star), and Chuck Zwicky.”

Bennie Salazar, the would-be protagonist in a bankrupt world, is a successful record executive who sprinkles gold flakes into his coffee because he is afraid he has lost the ability to and need for desire.

“Time is a goon, right?” he asks his childhood friend Scotty, once a brilliant guitarist, now a man without a purpose who goes fishing in the East River at 5 AM. “You gonna let that goon push you around?”

The book struck a chord with me as a music lover, a reader, and a writer myself. While more has been made of the cataclysmic shift the popular music industry has seen over the past twenty years, publishing is undergoing a similar rehabilitation (or is it debilitation?). I’m about to enter an MFA program in the fall. I have left all avenues of conventional employment, the idea being, that I will support myself with part-time work and freelance gigs, until I finally finish writing something I might be able to sell. My biggest fear is that I will not finish in time, and that the literary print publishing business will simply fall off the media tower — like a few 45s slipping off the the top of a tall stack of records, sliding under the couch, never to be seen again. (Actually, correction, my very biggest fear is that the polar ice caps melting from global warming will cause the sea level to rise so much that Los Angeles, CA and Chatham, MA — the two places on earth that are closest to my heart — will be completely submerged as latter-day Atlantis’). But these fears may be filed under the same general heading: Everything Is Changing And There’s Nothing I Can Do About It!

The book’s last chapter has the music industry relegated to making music for babies, who point at the songs they want (the demo is known as Pointers), and people texting each other in unintelligible word jumbles that do not resemble English, despite sitting right next to one another. Is the language that I have loved and studied, diligently mastered, the words I have handled like delicate butterfly carcasses, and the letters I have strung together like tiny beads — is this language going to die before I can make a permanent impact on its canon?

Rather than remain optimistic and soldier on — for that seems like a fool’s errand — what if I were to prepare? While we now know the cans of Spam and bombshelters of Cold War era suburbia were unnecessary, can we deny that such precautions were not prudent? I think they were. And people living in Los Angeles should always have earthquake kits in the trunks of their cars. So, what does a person do who has spent their entire adolescence training for a career that may be obsolete by the time they have mastered their craft?
I’ve oft considered working with my hands and sometimes wish I had developed a tangible skill such as pickling or haircutting. Med school is out because I never got past tenth grade biology, and while it’s a running joke among failed artists that they will apply to law school when they run out of ramen, I would make a terrible lawyer given that I have difficulty asking for rent money from my subletters, let alone spearheading a major litigation. This is a conundrum that I am opening up to the floor for discussion.

The aforementioned review bemoans the sputtering out of traditional music commerce: “You could argue, in this era of iTunes, with the music industry rapidly transforming itself, that the traditional rock album is dead. Ant to paraphrase Nietzsche, we killed it.”

Hallelujah! Every time a huggable Luddite with a copy of 1984 in his bag writes another article lambasting the invisible Man for the death of some or other cherished relic, I want to ask him who exactly he thinks killed it. We all did it. We’re all doing it. It takes a large number of people, and the cultivating of a vast and fickle landscape of social thought, to invent, execute, market, and sell the idea and reality of the eBook industry, as well as the blogosphere, and Twitter. This was no accident. The traditional print novel didn’t slip on a rock, fall of a cliff, and die. It was pushed.

In an interview with The Daily Beast, Egan said, “There’s this funny tension between our cultural desire to be transported backward, and our obsession with the new. Madonna’s done a superb job of walking that line; she’s always got a new trick up her sleeve, but part of her appeal comes from her awareness that she’s one more in a long line of female icons… Marilyn Monroe, etc. And the line continues; there would be no Lady Gaga without Madonna. But my 9-year-old loves Lady Gaga and refers to Madonna as ‘old school.’” Egan sums up this apt case study with the following succinct eulogy: “There’s no way to avoid becoming part of the past.”

I suppose that’s true. I can lament the demise of an industry I had hoped to one day join the higher echelons of. But should I remain immovable? Am I the sort to go around smashing Nooks and hurling Kindles into the ocean? Should I order that free-labor bloggers be shackled in the town square? I don’t really think so.
But…
Though there is no way to avoid becoming part of the past, I still believe some things are worth preserving. And, this language, and its endless possibilities of manipulation and permutation for the sake of stories, is one of them.

So, go buy A Visit From the Goon Squad, not so much because it’s a wonderful book (although it is the best I’ve read all year), but mores so we can keep the shop afloat long enough that I can squeeze out a three-book-deal.

If you’ve somehow managed to miss out the plasticized nametags and endless stream of free swag that is BEA, my experience of the first two days can be summarized thus:

-Three people whom I thought were Ken Chen but were not
-Three rounds of early morning bagpiping emanating from somewhere near the romance novel ghetto
-An estimated 27 adult women and 4 adult men spotted waiting for autographed copies of the new American Girl book
-One sighting of a wizened Margaret Atwood with entourage
-One accidental walk through of a Kathie Lee Gifford photoshoot
-One awkward encounter with Charles Frazier
-Four promotional tote bags, one African American romance novel, one miniature tape measure, one copy of Cook’s Illustrated, 12 books, one signed print of birds flocking in the shape of a golf tee, three temporary tattoos*

*(Am I wearing them?  You’ll have to get me drunk at the Goodreads party to find out.)