It’s been 10 years since the second U.S. invasion of Iraq and 12 years of American casualties in Afghanistan. Everyone’s exhausted, Big Media can’t seem to find a story. Until Iran becomes the next Iraq, no war news seems to be good war news.
For this week’s assignment I planned on reading Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life by the psychoanalytic writer and former child psychologist Adam Phillips. I knew the book would have smarty-pants discourse on King Lear and John Ashbery, but I was secretly looking for a little self-help. The first sentence of the prologue seemed promising:
The unexamined life is surely worth living, but is the unlived life worth examining? It seems a strange question until one realizes how much of our so-called mental life is about the lives we are not living, the lives we are missing out on, the lives we could be leading but for some reason are not.
We are inviting photographers, writers, illustrators, designers or anyone interested in visual storytelling to apply. Be sure to get your application in before April 15th.
Last week I gave a lecture to a couple of hundred students in Kansas. It was the first day back at school after Spring Break and the night before KU had won a big March Madness game. As the lights dimmed for my slideshow, I might as well have sung ‘rock-a-bye baby’ while I talked about Sleeping by the Mississippi. The twenty year olds were dropping like flies.
A couple of weeks ago I mentioned my attraction to stories about ordinary men failing to string together some good luck. For this week’s assignment, I read about a real humdinger of a a sad sack in A Hologram for The King by Dave Eggers. The protagonist, Alan Clay, is a 54-year old consultant trying to redeem himself after a series of financial and familial failures. His last ditch plan is to sell a holographic teleconferencing system to King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia.
Three Valleys is flying out the doors of LBM. Have a closer look here.
For reasons having nothing to do with religion, my six-year-old recently started attending a Catholic school. As we prepared for his first day, I was a little worried about his lack of knowledge about Christianity. Not only had he never been to church, I’m not sure we’d ever explained the whole Christ thing. Weeks after he started school, Pope Benedict announced that he was stepping down. With all of the talk in the news of red shoes and black smoke, I was even more concerned. I felt like we’d moved our son to a foreign country and we didn’t speak the language.
Established in 2008 by Alec Soth, Little Brown Mushroom (LBM) is committed to exploring the narrative potential of the photo book. Having worked closely with photographers, writers and designers, we’re now eager to exchange ideas with students and emerging artists.
My plan for this week’s assignment was to write about Jim Gavin’s much praised collection of short stories, Middle Men. The connected theme of these stories, ordinary men failing to string together some good luck in Southern California, seemed right up my middle-aged alley. The first few stories were entertaining enough, but then I made the mistake of watching an episode of Louie. After 20 minutes of my favorite TV shlump, I didn’t feel like reading four more bleakly humorous stories about men eating alone at Del Taco.
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