A digital reminder: The Fourth Annual Meshpartment Oscarama is tomorrow night at 7 p.m. With my Chanukah festivities on the wane, this is the only official party I host all year. If you live within 50 miles of my house, I think you kind of have a duty to be there. Did I mention that you should bring food?
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Ryan, my roommate who left Chattavegas for the bright lights and big scalpels of New York City, has been writing a simply mesmerizing series of posts on the basics of medical practice. I know this doesn't sound very exciting, but this is the first time I've seen the foundations of every clinical pathway explained coherently. Turns out that it all boils down to organ failure. So though you may not be dying of heartbreak, emo kids, you're eventually going to die of something breaking.
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Speaking of emo, I've been listening to the new Bright Eyes record -- the acoustic one, I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning -- and to my surprise, it doesn't suck. At all. Reminds me a lot of early Ryan Adams: about the same whine quotient, a little less discussion of bars, a lot more talk of God. Maybe Conor had to reach drinking age to stop annoying me. That's pretty much my feeling on most people, come to think of it.
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Bill and I are chopping away at the Pulse Blog, and hope to have up before you can say "hotly contested, dirty-tactics-filled mayoral campaign." We've got some exciting liveblogging news reports planned for early next week, as an official kickoff to the site. You'll love it.
Josiah is auditioning writers to replace Hunter S. Thompson in the hipster canon; the leading candidate so far has been Dave Eggers of Heartbreaking McSweeney's fame. I objected to the consensus, mostly because "Eggers, Schmeggers" is fun to say -- and because I prefer many of the writers he's discovered over Eggers himself, whose political writing can be obnoxiously self-indulgent.
But Eggers has a fine interview in the Onion AV Club this week, talking about his shifting opinions and his discomfort with fiction. "I always had a hard time with fiction. It does feel like driving a car in a clown suit. You're going somewhere, but you're in costume, and you're not really fooling anybody. You're the guy in costume, and everybody's supposed to forget that and go along with you. Obviously, it can work, it works all the time—well, it doesn't always work."
He also gets his digs in on snarky criticism, a perennial frustration of his magazines. "What deserves that kind of bile that people throw out? Sometimes they throw it out at literary fiction, which is like dressing up in full body armor to go attack an ice-cream cone. I mean, just take it easy."
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My newest writing, mostly bile-free, is up on the Pulse web site. You can find the links at right. There's lots of stuff about cavemen and demons, though I couldn't find any convincing link between the two subjects. There must be one, because demonic cavemen would make such a nice subject for a short story. I'm sure Hunter Thompson wrote one at some point.
I never really understood Hunter S. Thompson. That''s a remarkably stupid sentiment, of course, especially from somebody who never met the guy, read only samples of his books, and didn't live in the '70s. But what I mean to say is that I never entirely grasped his appeal. I suppose you have to have a natural taste for madness -- and I have a pathological terror of it -- to understand exactly why he summoned his muse with violence and drugs. (Lots of drugs.)
I respected his work, certainly. His eulogy for the American counter-cultural movement is the best evocation written about watching a glorious moment fade into a haze: We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark---the place where the wave finally broke and rolled back. But I never quite sniffed out the overpowering appeal, what separated him from Hemingway and Kerouac and all those others who wrote when they were dead stoned. (For that sort of thing, I always preferred Bangs.) I think I read him too late, or too self-seriously, or during times when I was too much of a Republican to appreciate him. I'll probably say the same thing if I'm around when Salinger dies.
Tom Wolfe has a fine appreciation in the Wall Street Journal today; he describes the young Thompson as "one of those tall, rawboned, rangy young men with alarmingly bright eyes, who more than any other sort of human, in my experience, are prone to manic explosions." I've only met a few of those men -- one of them writes humor for the Pulse -- but that seems as perceptive a encapsulation as any. I'm always a little afraid of that sort of energy, but I'm impressed by it too, and I'm truly sorry to hear that we've lost one of America's bravest writers. Here's to you, Duke. We lift our Wild Turkey glasses to you.
I'm back. I've missed you, etc. How was your vacation? Mine was busy: The Pulse hired me as the full-time City Editor in January, so I've been working to improve all content and churning out copy at all hours of the night. I'm quite pleased with some of it; the mayoral profiles and endorsement expressed my feelings -- and those of the Pulse's larger editorial board -- clearly enough that they're bound to hack people off.
"Hack off" is a favorite coloquialism of my new roommate, Abel Sisco, who has arrived from Nebraska, all Schmidt-like, to redesign my living room. (Those Cornhuskers are mad about interior decoration.) You can experience the newly-clean Meshpartment next weekend, when Abel and I will host the Third Annual Ex-RA Clubhouse Oscar Bash. That's February 27, starting at 7 p.m. If you know how to get to my house, you're invited. Bring food.
I'm still worrying over the look of this place; Bill and I are excited about soon connecting our blogs to the online Pulse, creating a trifecta of Chattanews dialogue. But I'm still distracted by daily editing chores, along with freelance work for Regional Obstetrics and Coptix. While you wait for inspired content, comfort yourself with the knowledge that there are now two other editions of Aaron Mesh in the world: this guy, who appears to be a Floridian punk rocker, and this kid, who I think is Ethiopian although he might just have written a paper about Africa. It's hard to say. (Yes, I googled myself. It was for professional reasons. No, I still don't feel good about it.) Discovering that two people -- one of them nicknamed Meshy -- share your uncommon moniker is a very American Splendor moment. I'm doing my best to cope. If you think buying me beer would help, I won't stop you.