So I have a kindle subscription to The New Yorker. I’d love to twalk about it with someone else who reads this shit.
In this most recent issue they have a section called Starting Out featuring anecdotes by popular literary writers about something earlier on in their life. These people include Junot Diaz, Jhumpa Lahiri, Jennifer Egan, this years Tea Obrecht, and some other ones that I had not heard of. Weirdly, all of the anecdotes are written in a sort of coordinated style in the sense that in a group such as the Spice Girls, you have a Sporty Spice, Baby Spice, Posh Spice, etc. So there is ghetto boy, logorea(sic) shy Indian booky girl, slightly pissed off bullied on girl and so on. There were two sentences that really struck me that I will imitate rather than mock- JL: our father did not make a great amount of money but we were wanting for nothing; and TO: something betwixt the crack of my front teeth. JD also used some grammatical irregularities in order distinguish his persona early in the piece. Now, I havn’t read a full novel by any of these people but I have read parts of beginnings and middles in bookstores. My question is do they always write like that? Is this what people refer to as literary voice nowadays? I mean I don’t want to get worked up over this because I’m assuming that there was some sort of art direction on the part of The New Yorker and they probably think its a little goofy as well like posing as Power Rangers. It just confuses me a little because some parts of the last issue was really good. Oh great, I can’t remember it anymore. I can’t remember much of what I read these days but Jonathon Spence’s review of Kissenger’s On China on NYRB was good, I remember that much.
