meh/style
Adelle Waldman,
Sarah Rose Etter,
Lydia Kiesling,
Tahmima Anam,
Ellen Pao,
Jenny Zhang,
Carrie Sun,
Claire Stanford,
Gabriela Garcia
My male friends proved that hunch right. They were everything I thought they’d be and more. Nothing prepared me for the contagious ecstasy of their pubescent masculinity—not previous experience nor avid reading nor extravagant daydreams. They were perfect human beings to me, godlike because they were limitless, meaning they acknowledged no boundaries or rules. And they were cute, unbearably cute, even—especially—when they were wasted, when they slurred and doled out emphatic affection, put their arms around my shoulders and leaned in heavily, murmured unintelligible words against my ear as they staggered toward another blackout. When the night wound down and we clumped together like littermates on floors or beds, I hoped the next day would never come.
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This was a life I’d hardly dared to dream of, one suffused with tribalism, freedom, and exultant chaos. I was like a burr snagged in the fur of a running wolf, swept away at an exhilarating gallop. I would have done anything to be near the boys because when I was, anything could happen—bad things, good things, things I’d never seen or done or thought of before. I loved when things happened. I didn’t feel capable of making things happen on my own, but I hoped to be present when they did.
the last few sentences are again crazy
In a panorama around me, the sky is melting: reds and oranges into inky blue and nighttime. I stare through the surely colour-distorting, anti-UV-tinted, floor-to-ceiling window-walls. Out past the skyscrapers and into the blurred green-grey horizon beyond. My fingers feel numb but my face is hot, and prickles. I log out of my workstation, pack up my handbag and head towards the lifts.
this is like almost good but the last sentence is stupid. "head towards the lifts" feels clumsy and lazy. what is the point of including this here? it doesn't even sound nice.
A buzz. He’s at the station already.
Nearly there, I send back.
what the hell is the point of this lol. another metaphor for the whole social mobility thing? is she really nearly there? it's too timid/uninteresting a theme to merit this much metaphor
“My guests!” said the host, now standing once more. There was another empty chair to his right. Who had been there? A man with a mustache or a woman with a braid. Someone with a gleaming emerald ring. I drank more wine. “You are far too polite!” the host said. “We have hundreds and hundreds of songbirds for you, and hundreds more waiting in the kitchen! Try the goldcrest. Try the warbler. Don’t leave until you’ve tasted the regent bowerbird. The Gouldian finches are purple, turquoise, black, and blue. How can you argue with that?” he said. “Enjoy them while you can because they’ll be gone before you know it.”
What the host meant is that we were running out of the birds not on the table but rather: on the Earth. True, just that morning we had lost the yellow-bellied gecko, the North American mountain lion, the Tunisian hunting rat, the African nutria, and the Japanese water rhinoceros. The week before went the spotted dolphin, the reddish arctic leopard, and the subterranean crow. It was a tragedy, but we were growing used to it every day. I sighed to think that I had never tasted any of them.
the first paragraph is pretty funny but the second kind of ruins it. spoils the punchline essentially
All eyes turned to plump Tracy as she walked away with their boss, her head bowed a little. The second she disappeared past the door, half a dozen people stood up in their cubicles, some grinning while others shook their heads. Tracy had started working here long before Tian. He liked her, a good-natured thirty-something, though she talked too much. Others had warned her to keep her mouth shut at work, but she’d never mended her ways.
A few minutes later Tracy came out, scratching the back of her ear, and forced a smile. ‘Got the axe,’ she told her colleagues, her eyes red and watery. She slouched into her cubicle to gather her belongings.
GAH STOP
The door always creaked like it was in pain when you opened it and slammed shut when you closed it. It made the small break room feel extra quiet and empty. He stood a moment in the echo of the door and tried to think about what he could have done better. Might have done better. He tried to think about what sort of person he wanted to be in this world and how he might bring that about. His doctor told him that he could only control his actions and not the feelings of others. But the kind of person that Per wanted to be was the kind of person who elicited from other people predictable, good feelings.
ehhhh this rubs me the wrong way but i need to think more about why
The cart had some poetry on it too, things picked up, read snickeringly and then set aside. Some people confused reading and literature – they supposed that these two things had a great deal to do with each other. This made for a lot of confusion because it prompted people to believe that reading was somehow the sort of behavior that was inherently good in a moral sense. When in fact the moral value assigned to reading had to do with the creation of the idea of literature, which some people imbued with all the solemnity of the holy when in fact it was a middlebrow bourgeois anachronism created in universities and retroactively applied to some of the greatest works of human history. In that way, reading and literature were the same. Yet in today’s world, reading had diverged even from these modest middlebrow origins and had sunk into some horribly populist activity.
A modern bookstore was perhaps the greatest example of this kind of fallacy. There were no true believers of this new religion, only empty-headed evangelists flogging the idea that all reading was good reading and that anything could count as reading, and anything could be literature, and that any reading was in fact reading literature and therefore morally unassailable, and in this way not merely morally good but also aesthetically good. There could never be a true faithful to such an empty string of logical transformations. Who could ever earnestly go on their knees in the quiet and the dark of their human soul and raise their face up and say to the vast and unknowable gods of that quiet inner darkness, Any reading is good reading.
i get the same reaction to this as i do to a lot of tony tulathimutte's writing lol
That weekend, Jamie and I went camping. He had been in the office all month—no fieldwork—and said he wanted to get outdoors. I wasn’t sure that car camping counted, but it was the best we could do, so we drove to a campground, set up our tent on a pre-groomed square of dirt, built a fire in the premade fire pit, and grilled some steaks that we had purchased at the grocery store down the road—steaks that were decidedly not local or organic or grass-fed but came in a Styrofoam tray, bloody and absurdly cheap, the product of farm subsidies that we paid for with our tax dollars because farmland fit our vision of America as a place of plenty.
what????
I heard his footsteps retreating down the hallway, down the stairs. I lifted the next item out of the box, a gray wool skirt suit. The fabric felt soft and luxe, a subtle pinstripe running top to bottom. But when I held up the matching jacket, I could tell that something about it was no longer right, theshoulders too big, the lapels too wide. This had probably been my mother’s nicest suit, the one she wore to court when she argued a big case. I held the jacket and I pictured her standing in front of judge and jury. She had been so full of life, so full of joy. How was it possible that I still had this jacket, and yet I didn’t have her?
this just feels so cliched im sorry