online archive
6:00PM
OCT 5 2007
Chic ironic bitterness
From The Believer, an interview with graphic novelist and cartoonist Adrian Tomine, who distinguishes between more precise drawings and better ones; are hotels for business trips and vacationing or are they spaces for the overturning of all bourgeois values? A review of Hotel Theory by Wayne Koestenbaum; and a review of Ovenman by Jeff Parker: Can a guy find poetry in a pizza oven? A review of Chic Ironic Bitterness: The Intellectual History of a Fashionable American Attitude by R. Jay Magill, Jr. The heavy hand: Something seems to be missing from modern literature: a little levity. Magazines, bring back the write-around! Regain your dignity with this secret weapon. On the matter of final words: Famous last utterances often seem too good to be true. Even the dead have their ghost writers.
