Sheila Heti’s 2005 essay “Stealing Glances”: ”Our culture is such that a greater value even than freedom is productivity, utility. I was having a conversation with a friend about leisure, and she was saying how much she enjoys doing nothing, just wandering aimlessly around her house, thinking. “I find it so productive,” she decided. Even an activity we enjoy precisely because it is not about production we must ultimately justify by way of its productivity.”
Rebecca Solnit’s “Apology to Mexico”: “I apologize. There are so many things I could apologize for, from the way the U.S. biotech corporation Monsanto has contaminated your corn to the way Arizona and Alabama are persecuting your citizens, but right now I’d like to apologize for the drug war, the ten thousand waking nightmares that make the news and the rest that don’t.”
“You Leave Them”: Short Fiction from Mona Simpson: A mother and daughter arrive in California:
“Our shirts were still sticky and sweet smelling, but the bad, sour side of sweet, when we drove into Los Angeles. My mother had called ahead for reservations at one of the hotels she’d read about, but she said she wouldn’t go there right away.
“‘Huh-uh. Look at us. And look at this car. We’re going to clean up a little first.’
“‘Why? They’re used to it, they’re a hotel, aren’t they?’
“‘Honey, the Bel Air isn’t just a hotel.’ She had the tone she always used when she was too tired to fight. ‘You’ll see.’
“‘Why can’t we wash up there?’
“‘Because. That’s why. You just don’t.’”
Tim Doody on the story of James Fadiman, who led research into benefits of LSD in 1960s until the US government ordered him to stop. Last year, at the age of 70, he began to advocate its use: A couple hundred people sat before him in folding chairs and along the side aisles of the hall. He adjusted his head microphone, then scrolled his lecture notes and side-stepped the podium. He felt fortunate to be there for many reasons, he said, including a health scare he’d had a few months back—a rather advanced case of pericarditis. “Some of you, I know, have experimented with enough substances so that you’ve ‘died.’ But it’s different when you’re in the ER.” He chuckled. “And you’re not on anything.”
Claire Lowdon on Jonathan “the Elephant” Franzen and Jonathan “the Termite” Lethem: “Elephant Art is self-important and ambitious, ‘big, ungainly, awards-season stuff.’ Termite Art exists unostentatiously, modestly, at the margins, forging ‘prestige-immune routes of curiosity through the cultural woodwork.’ Roughly speaking, Lethem is a practitioner of Termite Art and Jonathan Franzen a specialist in the Elephant kind.”
“In Which We Learn to Say Yes to Maybe”: Tracy Wan reviews Take This Waltz: “There is always a prospective age, nominated arbitrarily and instinctively, at which we firmly believe we’ll have made it as adults. This number is fluid — it grows with us — but always tucked into a mental pocket. At first, we look forward to it sleeplessly (sixteen, eighteen, twenty-one). Eventually (twenty-five for some, thirty for others, add a decade from that point on), it becomes a threat, a threshold that our failures should not dare to cross. Of course, a fluid number never makes an indelible mark: you never know when you’ve crossed into this realm. We wonder for most of our twenties; somewhere down the line, we get too busy to wonder.”
Maria Bustillos “on living, dying, and the digital afterlife”: “The digital world’s false perfection corresponds in some way to preferring a world containing certainties, where we can absolutely know answers that have been scientifically, empirically sought and found. In the practical conduct of human affairs, though, there is a stubborn tendency for complexities to arise, causing the idea of an on/off switch or a black/white answer to be at best of no use and at worst, a real impediment to progress (cf. Congress, U.S.) As Voltaire says: le mieux est l’ennemi du bien, (“the best is the enemy of the good”), by this indicating that the futile search for a black/white solution will inevitably blind us to the serviceability of the grey one. Is the desire for a chimerical “truth” ultimately the fatal flaw of the “scientific” lens through which we have tried to make sense of the world for the last few centuries?”
