Menand + Conover

by Weston Cutter

It happens: there’s more of one than the other (graham crackers vs. apples, Doritos vs. room in the stomach, books vs. time [more specifically, book reviews to write vs. other things to write]). This isn’t a fair treatment to the two following books, but I keep looking at them sitting here, keep telling myself to review them, and now, well, here we are. For the record, just so I don’t have to write it at the start of each review: I’d read anything written by Louis Menand or Ted Conover, and you should, too. Onward.

The Marketplace of Ideas by Louis Menand

I mean seriously, though, have you read this guy? You read American Studies and The Metaphysical Club, right? It’s easy enough to just blase-ly praise Louis Menand—Pulitzer, Harvard faculty, New Yorker staffer—but the guy cooks. In this exceptionally rich time of highfalutin theoretical and ideational nonfiction (David Shields, Ander Monson, the massively great Jake Silverstein—more on him coming soon), it can be (maybe just for me) easy to forget one of the great, great gifts of good nonfiction, which is this: it makes stuff more clear. Simple, right?

See, but it’s not. Whatever you’re into—city planning, jazz drumming, HS chemistry—go ahead and try to think real hard about it and then formulate a discussion about the tenets of it, the ideational constructs that’ve made that field what it is. You there? Tough? This is why we need writers like Menand, because in 158 pages the guy distills and boils down and de-gnarls the monumentally complicated aspects of general education at the college level (lest that sound like an uncomplicated task, take five minutes and try to come up with even a fuzzy roadmap of the issues at play)(I don’t mean to make that sound critical—maybe you’re a Menand, too—but I can’t do with it all the time and scratch paper on earth).

I dig the issue because it’s my line of work, but the great and not great part of post-secondary education in this country is that, no matter your line of work, it’s sort of that Trotsky-ian line: you may not take a great interest in gen ed, but gen ed takes a great interest in you (simple Q that highlights the issue, a la Hirsch: what texts should ever sixteen year old US student be familiar with?). The book should certainly be required reading for every college educator in the country, but honestly, I can think of no one who wouldn’t be well-served by a three hour bout with this book. Seriously, hear that? The couch is calling, and the book’s available everywhere.

The Routes of Man by Ted Conover

Conover’s been glory to me for years because of Newjack and, no, I’m lame and have not read his earlier stuff, though I keep intending to (and let’s note that Conover’s the clearest route I can see to Jonathan Mahler, and Mahler’s maybe the best reason to read the NYTimes Magazine). For all us folks who’ve been waiting for Conover to follow up New Jack, we’ve now been more than justly rewarded for the wait: The Routes of Man is a riveting, complex sprawl of a book, and reading it’s like sitting down to the most interesting meal on earth, one made entirely of ingredients you recognize but which’s configured in a way that’s utterly new, astonishing, enriching.

The structure of the book is uncomplicated: Conover looks at six different routes, and looks at the freight (animal, vegetable, human, forest-felled, mineral, etc.) thereover carried. It’s simple, until you give it a few seconds. The first chapter? Conover traces a brace of mahogany from forests in South America (Peruvian, specifically) to its final destination as elegantly crafted work in an apartment on Park Avenue in Manhattan. Just take a second and imagine what goes on in transit such as that.

I can’t imagine anyone not finding the chapter on Kenyan highways most riveting, thought it’s also the one that’s scariest and hardest to read: the highway allows transport of goods but, also, AIDS. It’s elements like that that makes Conover so endlessly valuable: I live along an Iowan highway over which, aside from farmers in pick-up trucks, mostly what’s rolling is live cargo, mostly pork. Would a story about the highways in NW Iowa be riveting?

Well, probably not, honestly, unless the story was from Conover. I’m not joking: the dude can make anything riveting and fascinating and, in all the right ways, his books are things you open and which, as you read, end up opening you. Please, please: read him.

Love’s Muse by Justin Biaggi and the Hopeless Romantics

by Jeremy Griffin

Beneath the vast umbrella of Good Music, there are really only two categories. The first are the ol’ standbys—those bands whose music you actively seek out, knowing that whatever expectations you may have will most assuredly be fulfilled. The second are those albums and songs that somehow find their way to you, usually through some network of fellow music enthusiasts, and that always leave you wondering how in the hell you’ve gone so long without having heard them. For me, Love’s Muse by Justin Biaggi and the Hopeless Romantics is the latter: I’d never even heard of the New York-based quintet until a friend slipped me a copy of the album, and even now, weeks later, I still can’t get the songs out of my head (and let me go ahead and acknowledge the fact that I’m a bit late to the party on this one—the album came out over a year ago—but, well, Good Music just operates on its own schedule: deal with it).

Of course the most defining feature of pop music is its ability to make love and heartbreak seem equally gratifying, perhaps because popular culture has conditioned us to believe that the latter is a natural extension of the former (this is why those flaky Nora Ephron flicks always have awesome soundtracks…and it’s the sole reason for John Cusack’s existence), and Love’s Muse articulates this paradox wonderfully. The album alternates between professions of love and brooding anthems of disaffection like “In Your Game/Requiem for a Poet,” in which frontman Biaggi, whose voice bears a not-so-incidental resemblance to Elvis Costello’s, croons bitterly, “You and I will be okay/ just don’t get in my way.” Blending the ethos of fifties doo-wap and late seventies punk, the songs are simple, concise, and ridiculously fun. The band favors bright, choppy chord progressions and hook-heavy melodies in the vein of the Clash, counterbalanced by loud, meaty choruses that would make Rivers Cuomo weep with pride.

Lyrically, the album isn’t exactly a homerun. There’s a kind of Mother Goose quality to some of the rhymes, uncomplicated to a fault—as in, say, the first couple of lines of “Clueless”: Having a day/ that won’t go away/ not until I keep you at bay. Yet, in a weird way, this actually works in the album’s favor. To be sure, JBATHR embraces its tweenish naivety with the kind of idealistic zeal usually reserved for characters in John Hughes movies. What I’m getting at is this: sometimes, in music, what we take to be ironic self-deprecation is actually honest-to-god earnestness, but of course we’re conditioned to believe that no musician is ever really giving us the truth—how uncool would that be?—and so our natural instinct is to believe the exact opposite. But, that isn’t the case here. JBATHR aren’t necessarily riffing on that quirky postmodern over-intellectualized version of love we’re accustomed to hearing about in most indie-pop (I’m looking at you, Moldy Peaches); they’re talking about the real thing, all that bubbly romantic business that makes us want to sing and tear out our hair at the same time. It’s the same guileless fervor that made folks like Bobby Vinton and Frankie Lymon such a big deal: Love’s Muse speaks to our need for validation of all those desperate, dippy impulses we can never seem to outgrow.

There are no “great” songs on Love’s Muse, though they are all “really good” inasmuch as they do exactly what they need to do. And, really, that’s okay. I mean, say what you want about the derivative nature of powerpop; I much prefer a band that does maybe one or two things really fucking well over a band that tries everything and fails miserably (see: the latest Flaming Lips release). There’s a certain charm to the album’s colorful simplicity–the way it seems to understand where it belongs in the music spectrum, and how it reminds the listener once again exactly how powerful a few chords and catchy hook can be.

Sarah Jaffe and You Just Found the Music You Need

by Weston Cutter

I don’t remember where I first heard Sarah Jaffe, it was maybe four months ago, and, like (I’d guess) all of us who’ve heard of her in the lead-up to her debut album Suburban Nature, I heard “Clementine,” and “Even Born Again,” both of which are available through her website and both of which will, if you’re even remotely alive/awake, knock you flat on your ass. Jaffe’s voice is the best instrument I’ve heard in a long, long time (it was a lucky winter for phenomenal female vocalists + songwriters, actually: both Jaffee and a woman named Lissie made January-March easier to suffer through [I'm in NW IA, which meant massive snow and endless cold]).

Superlatives and hyperbole run out quick when you listen to Jaffe: her tone is gorgeously clear and dynamic and, amazingly, conveys perfectly this mixture of openness and being guarded. The album’s song which I haven’t been able to stop playing is “Stay with Me,” in which she begins with this haunting: “If you say go, I will go / if you wanted to take it slow, we’ll take it slow.” That willingness on the singer’s part, to be there or to go, to do whatever, is, to me, breathtaking. It’s hard to write about this stuff because it ends up reading as corny (hence singing it instead), but it’s true. Like any number of singers in any number of songs, Jaffe sings, at the end of that song’s chorus, “Stay with me.” It’s a simple line; reading it on the page, it’s nothing, a dandelion’s whisp. Yet who hasn’t, at some point, crumpled at hearing that phrase spoken by someone? It’s easy to dismiss those stock phrases—I love you, I miss you, etc.—but Jaffe’s able to transform them, reload them with elemental magic, and when she sings lines you feel them, deeply and true and real and aching. She’s a devastator.

By the way: guitar, mostly. Guitar-based folk-something-or-other. I don’t know if folk’s a fair word for it–I don’t know what the genre type is we file music like Jaffe’s under (any of her songs would fit on any decent comp or mix I could conjure). I know the way of blogs: the tag is RIYL and I’m supposed to say “Lissie” or “Cat Power” or whatever, but that’s a shitty system, plus it’s cheap (for everyone involved). Jaffe’s songs are direct, clear, open, engaging, lyrically knock-down (for the most part: “LUV” doesn’t hit as hard as the rest of the album), and, honestly, somewhat snarly, in the best and most enticing ways: Jaffe’s not some blusher, and these aren’t wimpy songs of want and ache; they’re muscular + determined songs, and they hit hard, like things loosened from big depths.

Suburban Nature is out on iTunes right now as a digital download, and will be out in May from Kirtland Records, and the thing’s just a stunner. Seriously: the last time I was this excited about a new singer was, I don’t know, a decade+ ago, hearing Richard Buckner for the first time (let’s be fair: I’ve dug Throw Me the Statue and Bon Iver and Ritter and Spoon and everyone else, but in terms of just pure singing power? In terms of voice? It’s not even close). Jaffe’s opening shows in May for Norah Jones and, hopefully later in the summer, will be coming to venues near enough to all of us. Sarah was kind enough to answer some questions recently, and they’re below:

1. What are you reading? Likewise, to whom do you listen, what movies do you watch, what sports teams do you follow, cooking shows, etc. Basically: what’s the input that leads to your output (not to try and decipher yr music through that stuff, at all, just out of curiousity)?

Right now I’m kind of doing some light reading. On the humorous side. This book called Mortified. It’s a collection of stories I heard about through a This American Life piece…anyways, it’s just a compilation of different stories from different people. Really embarassing diary entries, notes between friends…Mortified actually travels as a group and they read their stories themselves. It’s pretty hysterical.

I’m listening to classics right now. David Bowie, Harry Nilsson. I’m also obsessing over a couple new records. Charlotte Gainsbourg’s IRM is insanely good. Also Gorillaz new record is wonderful.

2. What would success mean to you? Where are you, literally, in this process? Yes history/time will judge, no you have little direct control on album sales, and yet you’ve made this great disc, and you seem to be getting good notice, iTunes shines a light toward you, etc. Expand at will.

This record took about a week to record, same with the EP from two years ago. And I feel like in between the two I kind of harnessed where I wanna be, where I wanna take this record, and the next, and the next…I’ve gotten these great oppurtunities to tour with wonderful people. I guess in that way Ive gone farther than I expected, but that has nothing to do with me and everything to do with the wonderful support around me (like Midlake, Norah, Kirtland bringing me on the label). People just looking out for me, ya know? I hope to always be able to travel, and expand my sound in different ways. I look forward to things like that..growing as an artist..If I can continue to do that, that would be a success.

3. Who would be your dream collaborator? With whom would you love to work—musician, producer, whatever?

Daniel Lanois. He produces beautiful records.

It would be nice to work with Stephin Merritt. And by nice I mean a dream. He’s brilliant. Everything he does is very epic in a blatant way.

4. The disc is almost entirely about personal relationships, but the thing as a whole’s called Suburban Nature, and lots of the songs on here feature this narrator (=you) sort of pushing at someone, trying to get someone to be more clear, trying to get someone else to articulate stuff, to just do stuff. Is there a story-line that arcs through all these songs? Do you feel them connecting? Is the woman the same in all the songs? Does the album as a whole work together? (feel free to answer this as expansively or tersely as you wish).

These songs are all over the place as far as timeline goes..There are some songs I wrote when I was 17, and some I wrote 2 years ago. As far as a collective storyline, nothing was intentional. Thus far in my life, my inspiration in writing comes from first hand experience in relationships.  It constantly fascinates me the roles we take on, and the twists that occur sometimes…But these are songs I just chose to put on the record cause I wanted to get them out there, and together, they did, kind of create this story.

5. Do you like touring? Where’ve/what’ve been yr most enjoyable shows? Are you gonna be doing a whole bunch more touring this summer, post-Norah Jones?

I love touring. Honestly, that surprised me at first because I’m very much a creature of habit, and it is impossible to be that on the road…but i always manage to find my groove in it, and I can kind of appease both sides of my personality.

I had the time of my life seeing Europe with Midlake. That was the longest I had ever been out with what I think is an epic band. They are dears.

After Norah, Ill be doing a few more shows in May, then touring in June. Still working out those details. The plan is to be touring all summer going into the fall. I wanna tour as much as possible for this record.

6. Maybe it’s just me, but this year seems rife with great music coming–you, the National, LCD Soundsystem, Josh Ritter, etc. Is there any stuff yr super excited about that’s either just come out or is coming soon?

Im really excited about LCD Soundsystem. I just heard the single Drunk Girls and I think its pretty wonderful.

7. This is one of those sort of dorky/obligatory answers, but what’s yr take on the state of the music business at present? I’m just an outsider, a fan–I like that there’s blogs and blog aggregators, and that big companies have less and less a position in my life, but I’m curious about how it feels from the other side, as a musician. Again: expand away, I really don’t even know how much more clear to make the question. It’s maybe more of just a prompt.

I’m pretty naive when It comes to the business side of everything…or maybe not naive..I let it go over my head is more like it. It sucks the life out of me..business, that is.

I dont know that I’ve been in the business long enough to have a solid opinion on this. I mean, I know what legally, and prematurely downloading music has done for the business.. And it is something that will always continue. It still makes my blood boil a bit. But I’ve been told to take it as a compliment that the record is being “not bought”…..more opinions will be formed on the state of the music business down the road.

8. What’s the view out your window?

I’ve got the best windows and the best view in the house. I’ve got a view of my charming back yard, and my roommate’s garden.

Lipsyte

by Weston Cutter

Sam Lipsyte’s The Ask is like really delicious syrup of Ipecac—it’s gonna induce heaving deep in you, but how the heaving’s instigated is so great it’s hard to even much care. Here’s what I mean: I’m gonna open The Ask 4 times, and, I promise, each time I’ll find a sentence that’s just musically muscular and fantastic:

“Already I was the older fellow, suspect. Why had I not gone bounding into the surf of destiny? Why did I still lurk on this sorry spit?” (p. 52)

“I was going to be the bastard son’s minder, his mind reader. It couldn’t be as bad as building decks, and given what Purdy had intimated at the candy store, the payout would be better than paltry.” (103)

“I hated to travel into Manhattan with Bernie. The boy figured the sidewalks for a snack spread. Old gum, cigarette butts, bottle caps, petrified turds, even the occasional crack vial or broken syringe—Bernie could work it all into his mouth. Of course he could find such ad hoc oral solace on the boulevards of Queens, but the trash seemed less virulent there. It was the home poison.” (176)

“He stood with a generically stunning woman in a black silk dress. There were thousands, or at least several hundred, just like her in this part of the city, on Hudson and Chambers and Franklin and Worth, perfect storms of perfect bones, monuments to tone and hair technology. Around here she was almost ordinary, but you could still picture small towns where men might bludgeon their friends, their fathers, just to run their sun-cracked lips along her calves.” (246)

How about that shit? Look at those sentences, pretend they themselves are the calves of gorgeousness and let your sun-cracked lips along them. Feel that? The subtle little rhymes spiced throughout like pimentos or peppercorns, the occasional alliteration, the sometimes-overt rhyme (“oral solace” just kills me). Plus it’s not just sentences: check the second two and revel at how Lipsyte creates narrative bulk, makes totally clear and understandable both the physical thing he’s describing and the emotional heft it carries. It’s a dazzling trick he does just about every page of The Ask.

So how’s it like Ipecac, how’s it induce vomiting? Here’s a sad admission: I’m partial to ‘nice’ work, by and large. I loved, for instance, Metallica and Guns + Roses till I was in like 9th grade, and then it was all Replacements and Westerberg and Big Star and etc. In fiction and poetry, I’m similar: when I worked at a bookstore, I’d probably weekly crack that big black Outlaw Poetry Bible or whatever it’s called, and I’d try over and over to find my way in, but I just couldn’t. The thing is: I dig artifice. I like art that takes nastiness (or difficulty or chaos) and makes it beautiful.

Which, let’s be clear, Lipsyte does: sentence-by-sentence The Ask has to be one of the best books of the year. However, the book’s dude, Milo, is such a disagreeable bastard it’s hard to enjoy the thing as a whole (I felt real close to this same way about D. Gates’s Jernigan [I felt it a lot more strongly with Jernigan, though: Milo's not quite the endless prick that Jernigan is]). That’s not fair: it’s not hard to enjoy the book, it’s just punishing. You’ve got to deal with an asshole, page after page. On the one hand, his assholitry is funny, and it’s real and it means stuff, in the book’s context: it matters that he’s such an insufferable sad-sack, matters in a plot-way, because it gets into how he lives/deals with his boss Vargina, how he works his way in/around a plot that involves 1) an old college buddy and 2) that college buddy’s bastard kid, and how he (Milo) deals (largely: poorly) with his wife (it’s not even that Milo deals poorly with his wife, it’s that he deals poorly with his marraige, with the fact of it, the needs it entails).

I know I’m not getting much into what the story’s actually about, but the truth is (I’m pretty sure LMiller at Salon said something just like this, so maybe I’m stealing this from her)(maybe it wasn’t her, but it was somebody) The Ask has not tons to do with the actual “asks” that happen in the book because of Milo’s job (he works for a place he calls Mediocre U, and he works there asking for money from rich folks, hence “ask” as noun): the asks/demands the book’s really interested in are bigger and more significant than just the crummy corporate/capitalist asks Milo’s job entails, and the fact that the book’s after bigger game is why it’s such a strangely riveting read (I read this book over three weeks, and, each time I set the thing down, I’d tell myself that was it, that I wasn’t coming back. But, always, the gorgeous writing and the complexly deep story was more compelling than Milo and his awfulness were off-putting).

If you don’t know Lipsyte, by the way, you’re in trouble: he’s fantastic (if you’ve never read Venus Drive, attend to that even before you get to The Ask). If nothing else, it’s fascinating to enter a book which seems to be, just about equally, intent on pulling you in and pushing you out. Read it.

1996′s Wallace Now

by Weston Cutter

You know just from the fact of it that Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, David Lipsky’s road-trip bio/interview of DFWallace, is gonna be sad, or maybe not so much sad as hard: it’s Wallace in here, almost undiluted and pure, and while it’s wonderful to have this transcript, to have more bits of his voice to digest, it’s frustrating to know how little more there will be. Meaning: if you want to feel even shittier about September 12, 2008, read this book.

If you read this site at all, you care about books, and I can’t imagine anyone who presently cares about books who wouldn’t know/care quite a bit about DFWallace as well. Maybe that’s myopia. Regardless: sometime after his death, Rolling Stone ran this article which drew from some interview Lipsky’d done in ’96, literally right after Jest came out (like: on the book tour, specifically the last stop of the tour, which just so happened to be in St. Paul’s own dearly beloved + departed Hungry Mind Books [which was later named Ruminator, and which has since bit dust in all nomenclatures], which was where this reviewer first found out about and/or purchased copies of all sorts of massively important [to me] work [House of Leaves, Conjunctions 37, most of the first lit journals I ever purchased]). That Rolling Stone article was largely good (despite [and I can't imagine I'm the only one who felt this] that Lipsky seemed to go out of his way to articulate that Franzen was Wallace’s best friend…I didn’t know Wallace and don’t know Lipsky or Franzen, so maybe that’s how Wallace spoke of Franzen all the time ["my best friend"], but it felt weird–seriously, the phrase was used at least 3 times) and sad, which was about par for the course at that time (D. T. Max’s New Yorker piece was amazingly good and smart and sad, but it also had a hell of a lot less Wallace in it, so).

Well so now there’s this book, Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, and let’s get the public-service part of this review out of the way first: of course you need to buy this fucking book, are you kidding? Of course you buy it. It’s flawed and it’s got issues and those things don’t, in the end, matter anywhere near enough to prohibit purchase. Make haste to some clickable venue and add that shit to yr cart now.

So, the book: It’s actually mostly a wonder, is mostly just a transcript of Wallace’s voice, funny and self-involved and -examining and inbent and him, just so totally him. This is also the most happy I’ve ever read his speaking voice—he comes out several times and admits pride in Jest, at the accomplishment of it (not that it’s a massive book, but that he’d dumped himself into something and had worked as hard as he possibly could), he owns a love of writing and faith in the bother of the hard work of fiction at all. He sounds great in this book, largely: he sounds anxious about what the result of the hype surround Jest might mean, but he sounds great.

And, of course, by ‘great’ I mean he sounds Wallace-ian great: totally self-aware, clever and quick, both grateful and anxious at what he’s just gone through (think for a second of what it was he’d actually gone through. Toward the book’s end, Lipsky and Wallace work through Wallace’s chronology, and it’s harrowing: from McLean’s to Jest in less than a decade. Consider how you’d be doing. Plus it’s not just the writing he’d gotten through, it was the grind of the hype, the packed readings, the interviews, all of it. I’ve never had a book published, but imagine putting out a 1000+ page monster and having folks ask you the same questions over and over, and you have to sit there, knowing they haven’t even read the fucker).

Why’s the book frustrating, even mildly? Maybe I’ll be all alone in this, but this book wobbles, for me, because Lipsky seems like an absolute dick. He really does. And his dickishness has everything to do with how he seems to doubt Wallace. Let me be real clear: I never met Wallace, so maybe in person he really did come across as someone who was constantly and overtly trying to please/appease whoever he spoke with, but Lipsky, just in his questions, in the shape their conversation took, betrays a nagging doubt with Wallace’s authenticity (which, in fairness to Lipsky, would’ve been close to impossible not to sniff like mad and wag the conversation’s tail at: Wallace allows how the whole thing of writing a book and enjoying the success vs. being suspicious of the success is madness inducing, he does this over and over. Page 256: “Intensely good for thirty seconds, and then you’re hungry for more. And so that, clearly, I mean if you’re not stupid, you figure out that the real problem is the discontented self. That all this stuff that you think will work for a second, but then all it does is set up a hunger for more and better.” Anyone who’s read enough Wallace knows this was the big slippery trap for him, always.).

The other big way this is manifest in the book, and the way that it’s much more frustrating to deal with, is Lipsky’s continual little bracketed insertions thorughout the text, stuff he (presumably) wrote years after the actual interview (meaning=2010), and these bracketed insertions are Lipsky again doubting Wallace, Lipsky trying to get a meta-read on the whole of the interview. These moments of bracketed insertions aren’t everywhere, but they’re present enough, and they end up making Lipsky seem both 1) like someone who, through noting how Wallace is clearly trying to shape the scope of the conversation, somehow therefore doubts the authenticity of Wallace’s answers (but anyone with even two fucking synapses firing would have to be anxious and suspicious of how an interview in Rolling Stone would appear; Jest deals with this shit so directly it’s sort of shocking that Lipsky would have such a response to it), and, maybe worse, 2) like someone who thinks his readers need his help. Which, I don’t know, maybe, but the little insertions seem thin and weak and dumb, like chances for Lipsky to insert himself into the text, to put his own little decodings of certain situations inside the whole thing.

It’s a bizarre thing, honestly. I loved the book—I’ll love anything with Wallace—but Lipsky suffers a bit in this book. Again: I’m sure he’s a nice guy, but it’s hard to read at times. He clearly digs the hell out of Wallace—the preface and afterward, both at the book’s front, show him to be a decent and engaged guy and someone who seems to’ve wanted to present Wallace as clearly as possible. Unfortunately, he gets in his own way at times. The crucial bit of this comes at p. 216, when Lipsky, compression whatever he must’ve said, writes “There’s still something basically fakeabout your approach here. To some degree. Which is this: that I think you still feel you’re smarter than other people. And you’re acting like someone—you’re acting like someone who’s about thirty-one or thirty-two, who’s playing in the kid’s softball game, and is trying to hold back his power hitting, to check his swing at the plate, more or less...you make a point of holding back—there’s a point, there’s something obvious about you somehow in a gentle way holding back what you’re aware of as your intellegince to be with people who are somehow younger or…” Wallace gets snappish— “Boy, that would make me a real asshole, wouldn’t it?”—and then he digs further into it, in a line that’s just harrowing now to read: “The parts of me that used to think I was different or smarter or whatever, almost made me die.”

I don’t know the words to use for how Lipsky seems in this exchange, but it comes close to something like ungenerous, which is hard. Again: it’s not everywhere, doesn’t show up on every page, but it comes up enough to be of note. What’s gallows-funny about this thing Lipsky does is that it shows starkly + clearly why Wallace’d be so fucking cautious to talk to anyone in publicity at all to begin with: if what he says gets fundamentally doubted, why even bother? I’m glad Lipsky got this, and I’m thrilled the book exists, and I suppose the best thing is that, by the end, you feel even more tender toward Wallace than you already may have.

(a note: I hadn’t seen this interview with Lipsky, and he levels the same criticisms against himself as I have, so maybe he’s not a dick at all, and was just young and not too kind. Regardless.)