I don’t know why Jeffrey Eugenides set The Marriage Plot in the early 1980s (except that he was himself was a 20-something at the time), but I can say in retrospect why it feels necessary: there wasn’t any Facebook.
The Marriage Plot is about Madeleine Hanna, Leonard Bankhead and Mitchell Grammaticus, all seniors at Brown when we first meet (or hear of) them. Over the course of the novel, told in part through flashbacks, Mitchell meets and falls in love with Madeleine, who meets and falls in love with Leonard, who falls in love back with Madeleine. It would be an almost simplistic love story were it not for the narrative foil of Leonard, who in addition to being the Edward to Mitchell’s Jacob, is also bipolar. Management and treatment of the disease dominate his life, and in turn his relationship with Madeleine.
In the latest example of America never failing to be hilariously American, residents of basically every state have signed online petitions to secede from the union, something you can apparently do on the White House’s “We the People” website. Of course, signing such a petition — even for those states who managed more than 100,000 signatures (naming no names; Texas) — is very close to meaningless, but whatever, people like to do meaningless things that seem controversial and statement-y, and the media loves to report on those things so ultimately everyone’s happy. In reality, signing a petition to secede from the union is like running away from home and going to the mall. Or worse, since each of the potentially defecting states obviously receives money from the federal government, like running away to the mall and asking your mom to drive you there.
Sidebar though: Am I wrong to think that the We the People site is completely underrated? Obama administration, get on this: A bit of a redesign and this could be the Reddit of legislation. Sure, it might reduce the caliber of political discourse to just a few notches above cat memes, or, based on the current petitions, result in a lot of obscure statues, but it’d be worth it. I mean really, isn’t voting just crowdsourced government?
Anyway, since people in every state have signed one of these petitions, I’m not entirely sure what this post-secession country(ies) would look like (interactive feature idea for We the People 2.0: “make your own USA” map game), but the typical assumption on the subject is to think of the South wanting to secede from the North because of, well, a little thing called precedent. And it’s that particular assumption that makes it so fun to read Better Off Without ‘Em, Chuck Thompson’s impassioned (and at least partially facetious) manifesto for southern secession from the perspective of a northerner.
1. I cleaned my apartment! Not in the half-heartedly dusted random surfaces way, but like a for real cleaning, the kind where you move big pieces of furniture and discover weeks’ (months’) worth of hair ties and bottle caps, most of which the cat has pushed together into a central under-couch nest of mischief. Despite my apartment being so small it was until recently technically illegal, this kind of thorough cleaning somehow took me four hours to complete, roughly equivalent to four Weezer albums, which I listened to in order of least favorite to most because obviously that’s just good motivational planning.
2. Per my annual schedule, I completed my Fall Gym Visit. See you in four months, New York Sports Club. (Speaking of which, please stop updating your equipment so frequently that I have to re-learn how to turn on a stationary bike every time I show up. Thx.)
3. I finished, for what feels like the first time in months (a cursory blog review agrees), a really good, really interesting literary novel that made me think about stuff other than which real housewife should legitimately be considered the most famous and whether or not I should buy peanut butter for the express purpose of trying a peanut-butter-and-pickle sandwich.
Five days and 900 bags of potato chips later, I am back in business.
To clarify: I suffered no real damages from Hurricane/Tropical Storm/Superstorm/Royal Pain in the Ass Sandy. The No Parking sign across from my apartment blew down, as did the scaffolding hiding the construction site next door and the gate blocking off entry to an abandoned lot across the street. In short, when you live in Bushwick, epicenter of mostly defunct manufacturing facilities and empty plots of land, there’s not much to destroy. (And the potato chips mostly just reflect my poor grocery choices in the face of adverse weather conditions.)
But Sandy did wreak havoc on my neighbors (in the New York City sense, not my actual neighbors, who spent most of the storm playing really loud music and screaming whenever the lights flickered) and my heart continues to go out to people still dealing with power outages, ruined homes, lack of food and water and more. If you haven’t already, I highly encourage you to visit www.redcross.org and hand over some of your hard-earned dolla billz. It is the second-least you could do, after the actual least, which is nothing.
I should also thank those non-NYC peeps who reached out to me via phone or text or Facebook to make sure Godzilla and I fared well in the storm. Other than the brief panic attack I had over whether or not to take out my window AC unit, I got incredibly lucky in all of this, and Godzilla mostly just slept. I don’t think he even knows anything is amiss, except that I’ve been working from home for a week and so he can’t invite all his friends over, or whatever it is cats do when their owners aren’t around.
The Death and Life of Bobby Z is about impersonation. Written by Savages author Don Winslow, the novel follows Tim Kearney, a small-time criminal who, in the interest of saving himself from a prison death at the hands of gang members, agrees to impersonate legendary (and deceased) dope smugger Bobby Z so the DEA can trade him for one of their agents, who has been captured by a cartel. As can be expected when one decides to impersonate an infamous drug lord, Kearney finds himself in over his head, plopped in a desert compound with Z’s former employers, employees and lover. Adventure ensues.
The great fake front page my coworkers made for me, a Crain’s farewell tradition to which I have always aspired.
I’m behind on my reviews lately because tomorrow will be the final day in my own eight-year impersonation of someone else. Not a drug kingpin, mind you, an impersonation at which I would fail miserably (do kingpins own cats?), but rather a convincing impression of someone who knows anything about journalism, financial news, digital strategy or management. In short, I will be concluding my tenure with Crain’s New York Business.
I call my stint at Crain’s an impersonation not because I drove the thing into the ground, or because I think I’ve done a bad job in any of the four roles I’ve held at the company since 2007. Rather, I have since Day One (which in this case was my sophomore year of college, when I joined Crain’s as an intern) been surrounded by high-caliber journalists who taught me more in the first six months than a communications major did in four years. Some lessons I learned sneakily—eavesdropping on senior staffers to figure out how one successfully rejects a PR pitch—while others were offered up freely. Sometimes I learned by doing things right, but just as often by doing them wrong, leaving some poor editor to, for example, sort through my pathetic early attempts at feature writing. Basically, I’m a rookie who managed to sneak in with the pros, and somehow never got caught.
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