The Believer
The Age of Simulation
(01/07/2017)
…f the twentieth century, as Walter Benjamin characterized it, was the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, the twenty-first century will be the Age of Simulation. Increasingly, there are no fields of expertise, because so much of what is “expert” can be downloaded, and even if it has to be learned, the information is so accessible—even micro decisions, like, do I want an H-pipe or an X-pipe on my 1967 Camaro—that to be anything, any kind of professional anything, has become, and will progressively become, little more than a commitment to pretend to a given status. And that, of course, can only last for so long, before people realize they can’t really adopt permanent professional identities. We will each be, in our own way, simulations of however many identities we have the time or patience to pursue…
The Most Utterly Comprehensive List / Of Exemplary
Poeticisms—/ Be they great, inadvertent, or unsound— / As Uttered by our
most Esteemed Exemplars / And Guardians of Popular Culture.
(09/23/2014)
Rhyme is the rock on which thou art to wreck.
I’d say that in high school. I’d think it. I’d fear it. Poesy is itself an intimidating word. The lexicon is no more inviting: iambs, pentameter, feet, trochees, anapests. As a further discouragement, a deep understanding of meter yields little; overly metrical writing is annoying and provincial. That kind of language, that kind of rhythm, is so unnatural it’s become outmoded.
Or so I thought. As I worked on a Shakespeare project—I took apart the known works of Shakespeare and put them back together as a new play, All The World’s a Grave (it came out in 2008)—I was immersed in meter, which I realized isn’t so complicated after all, and is the firmament of not only poetry, but song lyrics and oratory…
Something Witchy for Leslie Van Houten
(05/16/2014)
…I’ve been thinking about Martha as part of a longer piece about my grandparents. My grandmother, with Munchausen by Proxy, killed four or five people—mostly by accident, but still. (My experience with the police—I’ve talked to them—is not exactly CSI.) One victim was her husband (her second husband, who was terminally ill, and took a very sudden turn for the worse), one was her lover (he was younger than her, in his 70s, not 80s, but he kept breaking limbs, and after Grandma’s series of several frantic calls about the level of care he required, he dropped dead), and two were her children. Martha and Norman. Or, well, I shouldn’t blame Grandma entirely. Martha died of melanoma, which doesn’t usually kill people (though Grandma may have cared for her to death), and Norman died in a scuba diving accident.
To explain: Grandma didn’t want Norman to go diving that day, but he had already put money down for the boat (scuba diving is very expensive), and he insisted on going, so she poisoned him, probably with prescription pills (but it could have been vitamins, she had been a nutritionist), and then when he went anyway he made a fatal miscalculation (he waited, um, on the sea floor, for help).
Should I say that my brother, my mother, my wife and I all believe this, but hope to be mistaken? My parents were very young when they had me, and until I was old enough to care for myself, Grandma would take me in for weeks at a time, and at Grandma’s I’d be amazed by this unusual thing that happened, which I assumed happened to everyone. Sometimes I would sleep for 48 hours straight. Also, a few times in the middle of the night, maybe half a dozen, I had trouble breathing, and Grandma had to rush me to the hospital…
George Orwell’s “The Freedom of the Press”
(05/17/2013)
First of all, I have to thank Daniel Levin Becker for the Sisyphean task of seeing this to publication. I know that I’m indebted to him, and to a bunch of other people at the Believer who I haven’t been in direct contact with. They assidiously fact-checked everything in here, a very old-world and conscientious thing to do. My gratitude.
In short, this is an Orwell essay that I rewrote in the context of Snowball’s Chance, which is my parody of Animal Farm that was recently rereleased (tenth anniversary) by Melville House.
“George Orwell’s ‘the Freedom of the Press,’ a proposed preface to Animal Farm, expurgated and footnoted (with a bias).”
- Penguin’s 2000 edition of Animal Farm included the essay “The Freedom of the Press,” which was identified as “Orwell’s Proposed Preface to Animal Farm” and dated 1945. The essay was first published in The Times Literary Supplement, 15 September 1972. You are reading a footnoted and elided version of that essay. By reading further, you risk participating in a crime; what I am doing here may be technically illegal…