Author: Caleb Crain

I’m sorry to be linking to something that isn’t online, but I can’t help myself, and you kids should get out more, anyway. There’s been a lot of foofaraw lately about who’s the worst critic of his generation. But the best critic of her generation, until further notice, is Terry Castle. Her article in the London Review of Books on lesbian seductress Mercedes de Acosta made me laugh more in twenty minutes than I have in the past month. The only thing in recent memory that compares to it is her essay on Patricia Highsmith in The New Republic, which I pressed on friends until they tired of me. How can you resist someone who writes like this:

The great thing about vampires, after all, was that they really cared about you. They were interested in you personally! So much so in fact that they would rise up out of their coffins, wamble over long distances (all the way from Transylvania) and sneak into your very own bedroom just to suck the blood out of you. It was weird but peculiarly gratifying.

It’s in the choice of the word wamble that you know you are looking at genius.

Gina Gionfriddo’s article on mourning Elliott Smith, published in the June 2004 issue of The Believer, is open-ended, well observed, emotionally vulnerable—a lovely essay on fandom, embarrassment, and falling in love with music. It’s hard to write about such things without seeming either insular or (much worse) condescending, and she pulls it off.

If you’ve ever wondered why blogrolls are so long, all you need to do is quietly weed out the items in your blogroll that aren’t in fact blogs, haven’t changed in months, and are not edited by your boyfriend. Within twenty-four hours, you get email like this:

I was just about to write you a note thanking you for linking to us, until I went to your site and saw that you un-linked! Traitor!

Evidently the young turks behind the new literary journal n+1 have finished their first issue, which will soon be printed, and are consequently greedy of press. Subscribe, because they are as talented as they are ambitious. You want to be in on the ground floor. You don’t want to be fishing around on ebay for back issues later, in a desperate attempt to repair the holes in your collection. And you don’t want to be on their bad side. (I certainly don’t, anyway. The links of everyone, whether quiet or petulant, have been restored.)

We saw the Decemberists last night at the Bowery Ballroom. They rock. They played “Sixteen Military Wives,” a new song, which proves that in addition to outsider-figures-in-historical-periods rock, they are masters at contemporary-political-protest rock. Are there any angry/ironic rock songs about the Iraq war one quarter as good? (Are there any other ones at all?) It’s my most fervent wish right now that they release it as a single in time for the election. (My next-most-fervent wish is that they accompany it with a B-side about Louis Napoleon, child of a famous political dynasty who spent his youth drinking and brawling and of whom little was expected, whose 1851 coup was facilitated by the deliberately created but misleading impression that he would be almost liberal or at least, well, compassionately conservative, but in fact led France into a few dozen years of imperialism.)