October 12, 2011
"At first fury alone propelled Mitchell. Claire wasn’t the first college girl to call him out for sexist behavior. It had been happening for years. Mitchell had always assumed that his father’s generation were the bad guys. Those old farts who who’d never washed a dish or folded socks—they were the target of feminist rage. But that had been merely the first assault. Now, in the eighties, arguments about the equitable division of household chores, or the inherent sexism of holding a door open for “a lady,” were old arguments. The movement had become less pragmatic and more theoretical. Male oppression of women wasn’t just a matter of certain deeds but and entire way of seeing and thinking. College feminists made fun of skyscrapers, saying they were phallic symbols. They said the same thing about space rockets, even though, if you stopped to think about it, rockets were shaped the way they were not because of phallocentrism but because of aerodynamics. Would a vagina-shaped Apollo 11 have made it to the moon? Evolution had created the penis. It was a useful structure for getting certain things done. And if it worked for the pistils of flowers as well as the inseminatory organs of Homo sapiens, whose fault was that but Biology’s? But no—anything large or grand in design, any long novel, big sculpture, or towering building, became, in the opinion of the “women” Mitchell knew at college, manifestations of male insecurity about the size of their penises. Girls were always going on about “male bonding,” too. Anytime two or more guys were having a good time, some girl had to make it sound pathological. What was so great about feminine relationships, Mitchell wanted to know? Maybe they could use a little female bonding."

— Jeffrey Eugenides “The Marriage Plot”

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October 11, 2011
"And yet sometimes she worried about what these musty old books we doing to her. Some people majored in English to prepare for law school. Others to become journalists. The smartest guy in the honors program, Adam Vogel, a child of academics, was planning on getting a Ph.D. and becoming an academic himself. That left of large contingent of people majoring in English by default. Because they weren’t left-brained enough for science, because history was too dry, philosophy too difficult, geology too petroleum-oriented, and math too mathematical—because they weren’t musical, artistic, financially motivated, or really all that smart, these people were pursuing university degrees doing something no different from what they’d done in first grade: reading stories. English was what people who didn’t know what to major in majored in."

— Jeffrey Eugenides — The Marriage Plot

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June 14, 2011
"He could have picked me up and taken me onto the bed with him. That gesture might have rescued us both, at least for the time being. I ached for it. I’d have given anything I imagined owning, in my greediest fantasies, to have been pulled into bed with him and held, as he’d held me on the Fourth of July. But he must have been embarrassed at having been caught fighting. Now he was a man who had awakened his child by yelling at his wife, and had flung himself across the bed like a heartbroken teenage girl. He could become other things, but he would always be that as well."

— Michael Cunningham “A Home at the End of the World”

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May 22, 2011
"That can happen when people die—the argument with them drops away and people so flawed while they were drawing breath that at times they were all but unbearable now assert themselves in the most appealing way, and what was least to your liking the day before yesterday becomes in the limousine behind the hearse a cause not only for sympathetic amusement but for admiration. In which estimate lies the greater reality—the uncharitable one permitted us before the funeral, forged, without any claptrap, in the skirmish of daily life, or the one that suffuses us with sadness at the family gathering afterward—even an outsider can’t judge. The sight of a coffin going into the ground can effect a great change of heart—all at once you find you are not so disappointed in this person who is dead—but what the sight of a coffin does for the mind in its search for truth, this I don’t profess to know."

— American Pastoral by Philip Roth

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May 22, 2011
"You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untanklike as you can be, sans cannon and machine guns and steel plating half a foot thick; you come at them unmenacingly on your own ten toes instead of tearing up the turf with your caterpillar treads, take them on with an open mind, as equals, man to man, as we used to say, and yet you never fails to get them wrong. You might as well have the brain of a tank. You get them wrong before you meet them, while you’re anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you’re with them; and then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again. Since the same generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion empty of all perception, an astonishing farce of misperception. And yet what are we to do about this terribly significant business of other people, which gets bled of the significance we think it has and takes on instead a significance that is ludicrous, so ill-equipped are we all to envision one another’s interior workings and invisible aims? Is everyone to go off and lock the door and sit secluded like the lonely writers do, in a soundproof cell, summoning people out of words and then proposing that these word people are closer to the real thing than the real people that we mangle with our ignorance every day? The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It’s getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong again. That’s how we know we’re alive: we’re wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that—well, lucky you"

— American Pastoral by Philip Roth

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May 17, 2011
"The father was no more than five seven or eight—a spidery man even more agitated than the father whose anxieties were shaping my own. Mr. Levov was one of those slum-reared Jewish fathers whose rough-hewn, undereducated perspective goaded a whole generation of striving, college-educated Jewish sons: a father for whom everything is an unshakable duty, for whom there is a right way and a wrong way and nothing in between, a father whose compound of ambitions, biases, and beliefs is so unruffled by careful thinking that he isn’t as easy to escape from as he seems. Limited men with limitless energy: men quick to be friendly and quick to be fed up; men for whom the most serious thing in life is to keep going despite everything. And we were their sons. It was our job to love them."

— American Pastoral by Philip Roth

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April 23, 2011
"‘When you first came to New York,’ she said, ‘all those years ago, you were full of ideas.’
Jules snorted. ‘Who isn’t, at twenty-four?’
‘I mean you had direction.’
He’d graduated from the University of Michigan a couple of years before. One of Stephanie’s freshman suite mates at NYU had left school for treatment of anorexia, and Jules had occupied the girl’s room for three months, wandering the city with a notebook, crashing parties at the Paris Review. By the time the anorexic returned, he’d gotten himself a job at Harper’s, an apartment on Eighty-first and York, and three roommates—two of whom now edited magazines. The third had won a Pulitzer.
‘I don’t get it, Jules,’ Stephanie said. ‘I don’t get what happened to you.’
Jules stared at the glittering skyline of Lower Manhattan without recognition. ‘I’m like America,’ he said.
Stephanie swung around to look at him, unnerved. ‘What are you talking about?’ she said. ‘Are you off your meds?’
‘Our hands are dirty,’ Jules said."

— Jennifer Egan “A Visit From the Goon Squad”

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(Notes: 1)
  
April 23, 2011
"Like all failed experiments, that one taught me something I didn’t expect: one key ingredient of so-called experience is the delusional faith that it is unique and special, that these included in it are privileged and those excluded from it are missing out. And I, like a scientist unwittingly inhaling toxic fumes from the beaker I was boiling in my lab, had, through sheer physical proximity, been infected by that same delusion and in my drugged state had come to believe I was Excluded: condemned to stand shivering outside the public library at Fifth Avenue and Forty-Second street forever and always, imagining the splendors within."

— Jennifer Egan “A Visit From the Goon Squad”

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April 22, 2011
On Graduation (A piece for The Reporter)

When I sat down to write what I thought was going to be an inspirational piece full of knowledge and sage wisdom, I came to the quick and humbling conclusion that I have virtually no vantage point or experience from which to give such advice. All I can do, I realized, is talk about some things I think ring true with importance at this time in your lives, and hopefully you’ll take something away from this—or at least more than I did a year ago when I graduated. But please, don’t assume that I’m writing this to tell you to reach for the stars or to lecture you on the inconvenient truths of adulthood. You’ve got Sunscreen songs and grandparents for those sorts of banal anecdotes. What I am here to do is to hand out a brief little tidbit of unsolicited advice about how to combat the forces in your 20’s that can and will attempt to blind you to what really matters.
Explore the world around you. This is perhaps the single most important time to live on earth. I know that’s going to sound extreme, but it really is. This is NOT me telling you to get up off the couch and forge ahead into the wilderness to live as Thoreau did at Walden. What it is (or at least what I think it is), is a challenge to willfully experience the world through your own eyes and to not, even for a second, allow yourself or others to deceive you into believing that the world as we know it has already been seen and conquered and understood by those that have come before us. We’re all a Google search away from attempting to explore both the beauty and darkness of our society—foreign nations, monuments, cultures, wars, and yes, even celebrity gossip—as they are carefully rendered to us in images and videos. But trust me, this type of exploration cannot and will not fulfill that basic youthful curiosity to understand the world and to see it as the marvel that it really is, to see it as more alive than anything could dream to be on screen. As you drift into the routine and responsibility of adult life, maintaining this curiosity will, I predict, become increasingly difficult. This is the honest to god challenge of our generation: to take the time granted to us by the conveniences of the modern world and to spend it finding and embracing what has yet to be seen or understood, to use the gifts of this freedom to grow together as human beings. 
None of us can do this alone. Don’t allow yourself to forget the people that helped you grow. Don’t forget the friends you had in college. Never again will you be able to develop relationships with people at a time when your collective senses of personal freedom and self-exploration are this alive. Your college friends will become a constant reminder of your potential and independence—that one time when you had the guts to do that one thing. This understanding will become essential. Just ask your parents. We live in an age of boundless communicative potential; don’t waste away days playing Angry Birds when you can be maintaining relationships—those with the ability to remind you that sometimes you’re going to take yourself too seriously, and sometimes you’re going to be wrong, and sometimes she or he won’t love you back, and sometimes life is just going to blow. But these realities are what make life worth living. Because those petty inconveniences in life will remind you of something that’s more important than almost anything else in the proverbial school of life: no matter how much the collaborative assault of personalized technology and advertisement might want you to believe it, the world isn’t and shouldn’t be tailor-made for YOU. 
It’s an old but true convention—we probably won’t recognize the most important moments or people in our lives until they’re gone. So, please, do your damndest not to let life or technology separate you from the beliefs and people that matter to you. And, from time to time, when they inevitably force you to do so, reach out your hands as desperately as you can, grab back hold of them with persistence, and allow yourself to entertain the notion that the most priceless assets we have in this world are each other. 

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(Notes: 1)
  
April 21, 2011
A Visit From the Goon Squad

“Here’s how it started: I was sitting on a bench in Tompkins Square Park reading a copy of Spin I’d swiped from Hudson News, observing East Village females crossing the park on their way home from work and wondering (as I often did) how my ex-wife managed to populate New York with thousands of women who looked nothing like her but still brought her to mind” (pg 92)

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