Onward, Frazzled Soldiers

1.


as per expectations, the New Yorker's election coverage
has been quite good. I particularly recommend Remnick's
the Joshua Generation, which begins:

Barack Obama could not run his campaign for the Presidency based on political accomplishment or on the heroic service of his youth. His record was too slight. His Democratic and Republican opponents were right: he ran largely on language, on the expression of a country’s potential and the self-expression of a complicated man who could reflect and lead that country. And a powerful thematic undercurrent of his oratory and prose was race. Not race as invoked by his predecessors in electoral politics or in the civil-rights movement, not race as an insistence on tribe or on redress; rather, Obama made his biracial ancestry a metaphor for his ambition to create a broad coalition of support, to rally Americans behind a narrative of moral and political progress. He was not its hero, but he just might be its culmination.

if you were not aware that the new yorker is a magazine
that can be found at newyorker.com, now you are.








2.

Succumbed, not succombed.

Zadi Smith has a piece in the New York Review of Books.
It seems to be about two trajectories that the novel
is on (it seems weird to put it that way, but . .), one
of which seems to originate with white dudes enamored
with the idea of the avant-garde.

Having spent the last year and a half in libraries downing
Mt Dew and wading through texts that have little to do
with the avant-garde or even novels, I do not feel qualified
to comment. I am reading the Sawtelle dog book from that
woman Oprah and her club, as grist for the conversational
mill with the parents. And Yates Revolutionary Road is
designated hitter re: Christmas break. I need to flesh
out the lineup, and would enjoy any suggestions that
lean away from the traditional/lyrical Realism and
countenance something a bit more fucked up.

If you have such suggestions, please do share.