New York Dolls
People ask me all the time, do you ever think you’ll go back to America to live one day. And I really feel like there’s no place for people like me there anymore. That doesn’t mean I don’t love it–I do, but you can love something without particularly liking it. I don’t like the fact that writers like Myles and Indiana and Benderson aren’t more highly revered in their own city, let alone their own country. And I don’t think I’m alone. I believe that there’s a secret generation of young writers like me who have needed writers like this, who still need writers like this, and by denying them, then there’s no place for us to come up. So when Eileen Myles starts getting published by major publishers, when Gary Indiana gets a column in the New York Times Book Review, when Bruce Benderson gets a statue, that’s when I’ll feel like America is a country worth returning home to.
By Travis Jeppesen.
Love Begins at the Nerve Endings
There’s a lot to be said for the anti-imperialist analysis of Margaret Mead and Franz Boas – the crimes of the British Empire still reverberate today – but it took away the human element: how does it feel for the Aztec child on the block? Does the Aztec child not bleed? Harris uses a passage from the anthropologist Donald Symons to underline the cruelty and absurdity: ‘If only one person in the world held down a terrified, struggling, screaming little girl, cut off her genitals with a septic blade, and sewed her back up, leaving only a tiny hole for urine and menstrual flow, the only question would be how severely that person should be punished.’ But if a million people do such things – it becomes culture!
Max Dunbar reviews Sam Harris‘s The Moral Landscape.