I was just mad I didn’t write this book.

This book sits on my wall and I haven’t technically finished it, nor The Empathy Exams, and to be honest I bought it so I could be seen buying it. The key is this book is for people who would do it do be seen knowing they wouldn’t be seen then writing about how that made them feel worthless. #smallbusinesssaturday

The Wallcreeper is The Fault in Our Stars for nerdfighters who disdain nerdfighting as a concept and are reluctant to associate themselves with nerdfighters. Plus she went to William and Mary, and I was blown away by this story she wrote in n+1 about medical tourism and death that I can’t find. Feel like she would write a scenario about Ansel Elgort’s variety of hot. Franzen totes would. Speaking of, Ansel does looks like a Franzenian teen doofus half the damn time – it’s the relentless specificity of his casual clothing and mannerisms. Nell Zink is very specific in a very different way but it’s a quality I value intensely.

I was just mad I didn’t write this book.

This book is maybe the most absorbing book I’ve read in ~5 years, and why I gave up writing my book, so I have a lot of “skin in the game.” Spent a good ~20 mins crying to this one on a plane to Vegas with my parents, then forcing everyone in the family to read it and listen to me complain that I never met the author before he was married so I would have someone who “gets” me.

Reading this book is like Connell bringing Ed home for Christmas:
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I was just mad I didn’t write this book.

Last spring, MetaWorldPeace pushed me to read Reminiscences by Anna Dostoyevsky while he pursued a “Julie and Julia” style project skimming Hitler tell-alls. But who cares if actual Dostoyevsky is free on Amazon? Why read Dostoyevsky when you can read Dostoyevsky, screenplay by Joe Eszterhas? I read both, unable to see forest for the bush. Neither was free of himself.

My parents believed in exposing their children to great art of any brow, even raised ones. When American Rhapsody first came out, I deliberately avoided it. The cover’s press-stung lips still await sticky fingers, smacking cheeky come-ons to whoever walks by to inhale the talismanic hirsuteness within—and I always walked away. Yet like him at press time, I was low, and meditating a lot on the Clinton administration. The best way to distill the Nineties is to slug the Cuyahoga runoff of the man who conjured them wholecloth. Who cares how agape you are, how many volatile organics are on that cloth? Let’s say the read lit my fire. As is so easy to forget, this man can write—amplify, amplify! The Eszterhas who narrates American Rhapsody is a broken man. A quieter intelligence is here, a hyperawareness of the lack of self-awareness of all Boomer men far beyond the sapiosexual whatnot you’re supposed to expect from his brand. In the deep heart’s choach, he is ass-deep, not at all the large and in-charge man who stares from the gloss like he’ll stab you. As he goes on to explain, outright evasion now amounts to nuance if it’s done with enough bravura, which wasn’t so obvious fifteen years ago as it is today. After I burned through American Rhapsody, I wondered in earnest if I would ever read another book. Then I downloaded Hollywood Animal, effing the haters—Eszterhas, now an orthodox Catholic, eschews “fuck”— all the way to the bank.

If selected for this fellowship for which I used this paragraph, I would like to use the Brooklyn space as my clinical responsibilities permit.

In an odd convergence, Koenig posted the leak to the song with a picture of Fidel Castro. (Same week Obama announced he’d open U.S.-Cuba diplomatic relations after 50 years of tension.) Many of his own works seem to draw off of cross cultural counter cultural picaresques like Been Down So Long it Looks Like Up To Me by Richard Farina, which is about a New York Ivy Leaguer’s relationship to Cuba. (Farina had a long association with Thomas Pynchon via Cornell.) Koenig is apparently delighted by a picture of peak Castro wearing 2 Rolexes and has posted it multiple times in different places.

A lot of music snobs felt Vampire Weekend “made it” when they opened for Animal Collective in 2007. That seems to be the point of origin here. They also toured with Dirty Projectors and YACHT, two acts with intense ties to Portland. (Claire Evans from YACHT co-wrote an Amazon studios pilot about tour openers, but not sure if it’ll ever happen.)

The rest – whatever.

Probably a more obscure reference now than it was a few years ago. The music press used to complain in the mid-2000s – around the time Vampire Weekend emerged – that there were a bunch of bands named after woodland animals. Stupid names, they said/slash/insinuated. Wolf Parade, “Wolf Like Me” by TV on the Radio, Deerhoof, Deer Tick, all that grizz. All of them came of age, it seemed, after Animal Collective finally got out of cult status. Daniel Rossen is one of the lead singers and guitarists for GB and has solo projects, including Department of Eagles. Chris Bear is the drummer, which is confusing because Chris Taylor is their everything else. Koenig is friends with the members of Grizzly Bear and makes a big-ass deal of his bromance with GB’s Ed Droste for “likes” (granted, they like each other a lot ~ </3 ~)

Whoa-uh-oh-oh, oh-oh.

Beta-blockers are sometimes prescribed to artists as prophylaxis for stage anxiety. Propranolol is standard of treatment for essential tremor, usually a condition of the elderly, but can also be used to dampen the adrenergic “fight or flight” stress response. So it’s a joke about him being so much of a fucking loser that even his musician friends are uncool. Imagine it’s the sort of detail that comes from personal experience.