Man at His Best

Still catching up on my issues of Esquire. Just finished reading November's, which made me ride a roller coaster of emotions. The always amazing Tom Chiarella helped me to understand rage and "what a man and his anger are capable of," as well as the profound and dynamic relationship between an aging father and son in his touching personal essay, "Damages." I suffered through my own kind of anger reading yet another profile on yet another grossly wealthy, young, ego-maniacal, "God-loving" basketball player, and instructions on making a prank call. Oh, Esquire... Like all great men I've loved, you are not perfect. But uh... sorry, could you just turn that down a bit? Thanks.

"The Case Against Jogging" inspired me to try high-intensity interval training (at an outdoor swimming pool in 46-degree weather), which unfortunately led to my first cold of the season. I developed a crush on fashion designer Simon Spurr and am convinced that Thespian needs to wear his suits. I was enthralled with Stephen Marche's A Thousand Words didactic on "losing your faith" in the almighty dollar in "What is a Dollar Worth? Perhaps Nothing." He concludes by saying:

But losing your faith, while painful, can also be liberating. The attraction of dollar value, which Marx predicted as the transformation of all "personal worth into exchange value," wasn't the same as greed; it was really just laziness... Losing the dollar as the marker of all value might reveal new possibilities of worth, for people and for things, even for the world.

The article update on Ryan Adams (um, who?) prompted an initially interesting conversation--and ensuing jukebox selections--from a strange man at a bar. But the intellectually stimulating music lesson soon turned into a not-so-subtle boob-stare-a-thon (as they so often do) and I resolved to read the rest of my nude-Rihanna-covered issue alone.

Then I was enraged, aghast and depressed while reading "'There is No Truth,' He Said. The Future of the Written Word, and Liberation of James Frey. With Space Aliens." by the bold and inspiring writer, John H. Richardson. The interview Richardson conducted with the author of the infamous (and untrue) memoir A Million Little Pieces twisted and turned dramatically (and ultimately proved quite illuminating and a little sad) but in the interim revealed a horrific glimpse into a totally Hollywood-centric, multimedia publishing industry that hires factories of fresh-faced (sans actual credit or appropriate compensation other than "the exposure") writers to churn out marketable ideas for page-screen-videogame projects and blurs the lines between "art" and "commerce," "fiction" and "nonfiction," "working writer" and "slave labor," etc. My favorite excerpt:

Frey: I think you're getting hung up on the idea of fine art--I don't think there's any difference between writing fine art and producing genre fiction. I think of it all as part of a larger body of work.

Richardson: That's so funny because when I was a kid in college, we were all militantly trying to collapse the boundaries between high and low--"There's no difference between rock 'n' roll and Milton, so why can't I write my thesis on Elvis Costello?" And, of course, we were right. But somehow that seems to have led to Jersey Shore.

Ah, yes... And because I refuse to post a clip from that effing show that has produced another literary genius, Snooki--here instead is a sweet, sweet classic from a true talent: