Author: Jamie

The Search for Serious Literary Fiction for Republicans
The shelves of America’s bookstores do not accurately represent the inner life of their customers. Where are the Tea Partiers dreaming of libertarian utopias? Whence the poets who howl for the rights of the unborn? The Mormon missionary comedies of manners? American literature seems to want for authors of a Republican slant.
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November 5, 2012
The Q&A: James Ellroy
JAMES ELLROY is the author of 13 novels, each grander in scale than the last. Perhaps best known for “L.A. Confidential” and “The Black Dahlia”, both of which were adapted to film, Mr Ellroy writes books that are often part of a short series and almost always door-stoppers. But his latest work, “Shakedown”, is a dramatic departure: it is a slim, one-volume, digital-only novella.
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October 31, 2012
The Damned Don’t Cry (But They Ought To)
After four debates and with a tsunami of political advertising inundating the United States, it is clear that neither presidential candidate is willing to act decisively on what should be the most pressing issue of our day: student loan debt. Democrats offer crumbs. Republicans even can’t be bothered to pander to young voters. Yet no other issue so neatly encapsulates the miseries of contemporary American existence. An entire generation of smart, educated people are being crippled with debt. Without some sort of relief, upward mobility will vanish, the gap between rich and poor will yawn wider, our economy will be left in ruins, and what’s left of our once vaunted ability to innovate will die. The parasite is killing the host.
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October 29, 2012
The Smug Technocrats who will rule Tomorrow
America should be more open than ever. Women and minorities are no longer excluded from high-earning professions and, if you are willing to take on the debt, a university education is more accessible than ever before. But if anything America is less egalitarian than it once was. The income gap between rich and poor has been growing since the 1970s. More worrying than that, a permanent class system seems to be calcifying into place: people born rich are getting richer, while the poor stay poor. America’s elite has found a way to protect and perpetuate itself within what should be an inclusive system.
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October 1, 2012
Literary Magazines: Read all about it
SHORT literary fiction and critical essays are the publishing world’s equivalent of weapons-grade plutonium. Dense, highly refined, and for all but a professional few, something best avoided. The world’s demand for the stuff is met by a handful of respectable quarterlies, such as the Paris Review and Granta, and countless “little magazines” that publish experimental fiction and serve more as a proving ground for authors than something people actually read.
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September 14, 2012
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September 1, 2012
The Case of the Radioactive Redhead
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August 11, 2012
Will Barnet, Anticipation, 1980

(Source: wikipaintings.org, via oldtimeycats)
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August 8, 2012
archiveofaffinities:

Kevin Roche, John Dinkeloo, and Associates, Knights of Columbus Office Building, New Haven, Connecticut, 1969

(via architectureofdoom)
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August 8, 2012
Common People: Class And The 80s
In the 1970s it was unusual to see wealthy families on television. The Jeffersons with their deluxe apartment in the sky, the occasional rich couple flitting over to “Fantasy Island” or booking a cruise on “The Love Boat”—these were the exceptions. But as the economy accelerated, mass culture was suddenly inundated with images of affluence. The wave hit around 1981, as the economy slowly recovered from the stagnant wages and inflation of the 1970s. Rabbit Angstrom, John Updike’s scampering everyman, began to make serious money on his appreciating property and selling Toyotas on his father-in-law’s lot in Rabbit is Rich; Joan Collins joined the cast of “Dynasty” as the splendid and venomous Alexis; and the second edition of The Official Preppy Handbook came out, gently mocking but also instructing a peculiar subculture of well-coiffed, pastel-hue wearing teenagers who wanted to look as if they summered on Cape Cod and worked on Wall Street.
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August 6, 2012