HARK!
I hear...random critiques...
To quote someone who put it so eloquently: “I ain't’ complainin’—I’m just bitchin’.”
Hey, the holiday is over: out with the thankfulness, in with the crankiness.
No bitchin’ about this, as it’s a free, online literary event:
Brenda Peynado will read from her fiction and then offer a craft talk for writers at 5 p.m. (Mountain Time) Wednesday, Dec. 1. It’s the first event in Eastern Illinois University's annual literary festival. Register here.
Peynado is the author of a new story collection called “The Rock Eaters.” Her stories have won numerous awards (O. Henry Award, Pushcart Prize, etc.). She's working on a novel and teaches creative writing at the University of Houston.
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Seriously?
Who outside a very-rich cow would be stupid enough to pay $9.99 for a “vegan milkshake”?
Answer: Me.
This trying-hard-to-be-vegan (kind of like a serial killer support group: “Had a really good week. Hey, I’m not perfect, but I’m really cutting down…”) took the plunge on “Craig’s Vegan Shake” from Fatburger.
And now, I am...pi$$ed!
How did I miss the “Impossible Chicken Nuggets Made from Plants”?!
The vegan shake itself: Delicious!
I tasted my wife’s “regular” shake and couldn’t tell much difference—except I thought mine was better.
Here’s how the burger joint that started in L.A. a half-century ago describes it: “The classic made vegan using Craig’s cashew based ice cream, oat milk, and coconut milk whipped cream. Please note this product contains tree nuts (cashews & coconuts). Fatburger is not a certified vegan restaurant.”
Hopefully, none of that burger grease got dripped into my shake…
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Dear New Yorker magazine:
I reluctantly continue my love-hate relationship with you.
Yes, you have some great stories and it’s always great to vicariously stroll around in the museum and literary pieces from out here in this culture-desert.
But some of your stories lately really make me want to call your headquarters, wait on hold for a couple of hours, then scream, “YOUR DOG-MAD RIGHT YOU CAN HELP ME! CANCEL MY…”
No, no—don’t do it! Just kidding!
I’m not in any way ready to sever ties.
But c’mon, New Yorker! Where’s your pride?! (insert Gordon Ramsey emoji)
That thing you had Sept. 27, about Patricia Highsmith?
Speaking on behalf of bitter, rejected writers: how dare you devote pages and pages to a dead writer?
Not only that—but a bigot and a racist. As you so delicately put it, in your otherwise gushy introduction to her diary excerpt, “By the time of her death, she had alienated many of the people in her life, espousing racist, anti-Semitic, and otherwise offensive views...”
But, oh, f--- it, we're the New Yorker, we got our hands on this juicy thing and we’re going to publish it, anyway:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/10/04/a-portrait-of-the-writer-as-a-young-woman
Then, a month later, you go off for pages and pages on this Claude Fredericks, “a printer, playwright, amateur poet, and classics professor, who died in 2013.”
Another dead writer, thanks a lot.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/11/08/the-most-ambitious-diary-in-history-claude-fredericks
Sure, he may have written (as your headline says) “The Most Ambitious Diary in History,” and (as your sub-head says) “knew Anaïs Nin and James Merrill, and taught Donna Tartt.”
Again, New Yorker, you roll out the red carpet to a dead writer’s ugly issues, here only hinting at “the problem of some anti-Semitic remarks” in the mega-journal. Adding to that, this diary-addict who apparently often wrote about seducing his students resigned from his teaching post after a sexual-harassment allegation.
New Yorker, did you not get the memo about the cancel culture?
With this one, you Manhattan folks really flipped it around: where celebrities have been “canceled” for similar horrible conduct, you actually raise someone up from the ashes of a tiny cult he founded…
Next, with a story in your Nov. 29 issue, it’s not a question of whether you should be pimping bigoted dead writers, it’s a question of….huh?
Ed Caesar, your staff writer who has done some fascinating work on a dangerous, decaying tanker and the Dark Web, turns in an absolute stinker.
Literally:
“I brushed my teeth and removed my contact lenses, then took a shit behind a huge rock, armed with a packet of Kleenex.”
New Yorker—did none of your editors think “ah, too much information…”
Anyway, Caesar takes a “Get Lost” trip choreographed by a survival-adventure-vacation company (Black Tomato) that drops him off in a scarcely-populated Moroccan desert and tells him to hike 18 miles in two days, following maps to get to checkpoints….
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/11/29/the-new-luxury-vacation-being-dumped-in-the-middle-of-nowhere
Some of no-hail Caesar’s less-than-electric observations:
“I think I saw the Plough, although I’ve always been baffled by the constellations…”
“I filled my water bottles for the day from a large drum that Asher had left, built a fire for breakfast, cooked a meal, struck the shelter, charged my Samsung, brushed my teeth, and packed my bag.”
“My head pounded, and my pee turned the color of Berber tea.”
Our fearless writer discusses how he used lessons learned at a survival camp in remote islands he went to as a boy; but, he sheepishly mentions, when he Googled to see if the camp is still in operation, he discovered its founder is in jail, for sexualy abusing boys at the camp.
“I was chilled to learn that I had been exposed to a predator, and felt terrible for the victims. Was it wrong, then, that I remained grateful for my own experiences on the islands?”
New Yorker—why didn’t you give him the obvious answer?
YES IT’S WRONG!
But that wouldn’t have ruined his back-story, about how his boyhood lessons prepared him to survive these dangerous 36 hours...
He makes it!
Whew!
And then he finds out the "Get Lost" company reps who set up the two-day walk into the “unknown” were literally right behind him, and “had been tracking me the entire way on foot—at a distance of about five hundred yards.”
Oh, New Yorker. C'mon, mag!
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