Harper's Magazine: C/D

The story on Prince was very good; I can tell because it cheered me emotionally and made me listen to a lot of Prince. Admittedly neither of those is the hugest feat but it feels like one of those nice surprises that keeps me subscribed to this magazine.

yeah there is way more in this issue that i'm gravitating towards; i hadn't realised a 900 page richard brautigan bio had come out (this kinda feel like the spiritual-opposite approach to writing a richard brautigan than the one i'd expect, but that's okay); & i'm not finished w the prince piece yet but i'm all interested. i mean i never knew jamie foxx was a comic. i read this online which limits how much i dip into the lil findings sections, which are often some of the best bits i think.

Yeah the Brautigan bio piece was a surprise to me, too! Not done w/that yet. I wonder if the book itself is worth the commitment? I was once such a Brautigan maniac that I tried to dress exactly like him and everything (teenager).

You'd think I'd try to dress like the LADIES on his cover, but: no.

Brautigan's death bums me out so bad. His stuff meant so fuckin much to me back when

ha ha no dressing like RB is way better. tbh i feel like everything other than affecting the half-haunted expression is a sideshow though; i have a picture of myself outside the presidio library & all it does is enumerate the differences between us. i haven't looked at the review, yet (i dug up a times piece, too, cause given that i'm not about to sit down with a 900 page book & make headway with it i might as well soak up some stuff other people have skimmed from it), but i had weird experiences with the other couple of Brautigan bios; his daughter's was the one i took to best (though never finished), just cause she got with the write-endearingly-like-Richard-Brautigan-did thing, not even in voice but just in vignette & drift. i don't know if i want to read a really long brautigan bio or not.

his last couple books of poetry, the sad japanese stuff (partic june 30th, june 30th, & that last novel that i can't remember the name of (wait, an unfortunate woman?, right?), where he isn't even trying to map any fictional distance onto the life he's writing, are so so sad. there's so much empty space in them. all really great, just kinda hard to work through, particularly with how funny anything earlier is.

I haven't read them in a long time, and I wonder what I'd think now - but when I read Willard and His Bowling Trophies and Sombrero Fallout I loved them, a lot, and couldn't get why people thought he'd lost it. To me it seemed like his humor'd just gotten darker. Willard in particular could practically be a Coen brothers comedy.

oh man i haven't read willard. there are maybe ten of salinger's 22 stories i've never read, & i think i just like knowing that there's still some salinger out there for me in the world, once in a while when i think of him. a bunch of libraries i've belonged to have had reserve copies of the few brautigan novels i haven't read - the genre-y stuff, i think, hawkline monster, willard, &c - & i think it's just comforting knowing i can go drink from that well when i want to. i turn reading into such a sad aspirational hassle & to read one of his books is so pleasurable.

sombrero fallout is one of my favs. it's so funny. i have been thinking about this guy a little recently because he's the closest thing i have to the pile of records inseparable from past relationships; the books have figured pretty centrally w/most everyone i dated, either by describing things or else because of us reading the books together & stuff. i can't imagine having read him without fastening him to some part of my life.

you didnt know jamie foxx was a comic?!?!?!?

ha, no? like he wasn't on my radar until ray, he wasn't any part of the fabric of me growing up or watching tv or anything. jamie foxx as a person always kinda weirds me out & i'm still soaking up what this new layer of the onion means about him. if there are crucial jamie foxx '90s youtubes i should be watching let me know.

haha i guess the jamie foxx show wasnt as ubiquitous as had imagined at the time

i was in the uk, we were watching gritty dramas about the marital tensions of coalminers & their wives, there was no room for this humour about hollywood & crushing on prince

Guy who wrote the Brautigan book also wrote the book Angel Heart is based on, Fallen Angel, I think, and some kind of historical whodunit featuring Arthur Conan Doyle and Kit Carson, maybe. Counterpoint is a pretty classy imprint, think I may have started a go-nowhere thread about it.

Falling Angel. Conan Doyle and Houdini.

decent piece from the publisher: http://harpers.org/blog/2013/03/obamas-real-political-program/

i really loved the ehrenreich excerpt

Doug Henwood's Hillary takedown is very good and fair-minded, although I'm not sure what it accomplishes since I feel like a lot of people already don't love her and will vote for her anyway in the seeming absence of other options.

The ISIS article is great, maybe best thing I've read on the topic so far.

technological workplace monitoring article freaking me out

i just subscribed to this
there is this kind of shimmering vein of newness, presentness, running through some of the best harper's things, something i can't find elsewhere
the list of asmr requests last issue, the piece on tech libertarians, just fragments
really a nice part of my month

&

did anyone read the Values-of-a-Solitary-Life article

i kinda found it simultaneously unbearable, for its outlook, & valuable, for its frame of reference

Solitude is overrated

Believe me

really feel you
kind of a hard piece to read occuyping some of the same spaces as the author without having made lemonade from them

i wonder just how many pieces lewis lapham has written decrying american politics/society with comparisons to the fall of rome (republic or empire, take your pick)

not that he's *wrong*, but it's a very specific and tiresome hammer he wields. mixed it up by going with the greeks this last time, at least

i couldn't even bear to start that article.

lol, I haven't read him in years but I feel like that was every "Easy Chair" (or whatever they called the editor's column at the time) he ever wrote. He seemed completely useless to me as a writer and thinker.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CSlAnIbWoAAGoVF.png

smdh

"When journalists themselves wage campaigns to suppress the writing of other journalists, and intend to destroy a magazine for not toeing their ideological line, you can see how free speech truly is on the line." https://t.co/BjFbmBgqHJ

— Harper's Magazine (@Harpers) January 12, 2018

🙄

There are some judgments in that piece that bypass "right-wing columnist" and go straight to "failed human"

https://harpers.org/a-letter-on-justice-and-open-debate/

dud

the motives of these signatories aside, there's no attempt (by some) to establish thoughtcrime in the name of progressivism right now, huh? Check.

the motives of these signatories aside

sorry can't extricate letter from motives of signatories

which likely vary except in Wokeland

that's where i live

On the positive side, my homie wrote this one:
https://harpers.org/archive/2020/07/this-is-not-a-test-disaster-city-texas/