marcus

Questions we did not ask, because Ovid already asked them so well: In what way would commitment to each other differ from a commitment against our own solitude? In what way would our daily compromises, our small shifts against our own nature, build into bulldogs of resentment that we would soon unleash upon each other? In what would our displays of affection toward each other differ from advertisements of what we most wanted done to ourselves? (Ben Marcus, "Children, Cover Your Eyes," reprinted in Harper's Magazine, February 2005, p. 26)

de zengotita

And, by further extension, all the high-fiving and hissed-yes-pointing and thumbs-upping in the culture as a whole, in commercials, in our lives, in the continuous play of expressions and gestures that signify degrees of - what shall we call it? - triumphal intensity. The alchemy at work across this spectrum is, at bottom, the same. It precipitates a fusion of the real and represented, a culture of performance that ultimately constitutes a quality of being, a type of each person - the mediated person. And, as we shall see, this type of person doesn't have heroes. (Thomas de Zengotita, "Attack of the Superzeroes: Why Washington, Einstein, and Madonna can't compete with you," in Harper's Magazine, December 2004, p. 39)

slouka

When I was young, my parents read me Aesop's fable of "The Ant and the Grasshopper," wherein, as everyone knows, the grasshopper spends the summer making music in the sun while the ant toils with his fell formicidae. Ievitably, winter comes, as winter will, and the grasshopper, who hasn't planned ahead and who doesn't know what a 401K is, has run out of luck. When he shows up at the ants' door, carrying his fiddle, the ant asks him what he was doing all year. "I was singing, if you please," the grasshopper replies, or something to that effect. "You were singing?" asks the ant. "Well, then, go and sing." And perhaps because I sensed, even then, that fate would someday find me holding a violin or a manuscript at the door of the ants, my antennae frozen and my bills overdue, I confounded both Aesop and my well-meaning parents, and bore away the wrong moral. That summer, many a windblown grasshopper was saved from the pond, and many an anthill inundated under the golden rain of my pee. (Mark Slouka, "Quitting the Paint Factory: On the virtues of idleness" in Harper's Magazine, November 2004, p. 57)