Reading is the only way to learn how to write. I kept pushing this point all semester and I certainly assigned a lot of readings. This being college, and these being college students, we operate with this wonderful notion that everyone has the time and desire to read it all.
But anyone who ever went to college knows that’s not true. Although I “loved to read” as a teenager and college student, I didn’t truly get busy reading until after I left college. At about age 22 or 23, I suddenly wanted to read everything, especially longform feature writing, nonfiction books, cultural criticism and serious magazines and newspapers. I started reading not only for content, but to study the craftsmanship.
It’s a habit, like exercise. Wondering why a particular writer seems to have so many ideas and great stories in him is like wondering why someone has six-pack abs. (Sorry for this sorta macho metaphor.) People with beautiful bodies make it look easy, because the rest of us don’t get up every single morning and see them working out for hours and hours. People with beautiful words in them are working out, too, when they read. Last week’s New Yorker is basically 100 stomach crunches or a series of stretches, just a warm-up to our real regimen. Reading is regarded by most as a leisure activity, but it isn’t — or not only. It takes the same sort of discipline as exercise. It requires the same amount of effort.
There are several articles I wanted us to read as a group in the class that we just never got around to. (I always knew we’d never get to all of it.) When I tweaked the final two weeks of class and altered the final story assignment, I abandoned quite a few examples of pop-culture narrative, especially the longer stuff.
So here’s a list. You might not ever get around to it. Many years may go by, and, in a nostalgic twitch, you’ll return here for these links. They’ll be here.
My biggest regret is that we didn’t get to do the fraught genre of Celebrity Profiles. I was going to start with two classics …
• “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” by Gay Talese in the April 1966 issue of Esquire, which has been studied and autopsied time and again.
• Pair this with “Do You Sleep in the Nude?,” a profile of Ava Gardner by Rex Reed, also from Esquire. (Not online, that I can find, but reprinted here in The New Journalism.)
For the sake of discussion, I wanted to contrast that with a couple of celebrity profiles from the current day that provoked a lot of debate about the genre, including self-indulgent writing, breaking conventional formats, crossing ethical boundaries, jealous writers, “girly” journalism and whatnot:
• “American Marvel,” Edith Zimmerman’s profile of actor Chris Evans from GQ in 2011.
• “The Full Tatum,” Jessica Pressler’s profile of Channing Tatum, also from GQ in 2011.
… and I was also going to ask the Jour494 students to fan out into the world and bring back a celebrity profile from the current crop and dissect it, looking for how it was assembled and where (or if) any journalistic compromises seem to have been made.
Some other readings we never got to:
• Maureen Tkacik’s 2011 takedown essay about Steve Jobs. This remarkable, measuredly brutal essay ran during a wave of hagiographic obituaries after Jobs’s death. It also gives us a lot to think about, argue about, and consider –not only about Jobs, but about our tech-consumer culture.
• I wanted us to read Dan Kois’s 2012 New York Times Magazine profile/story about Lynda Barry’s writing workshops, mostly for the pure pleasure of it.
• I wanted us to read a couple of Chris Jones (former Pollner prof, Esquire writer) articles: One, a gorgeous 201o profile of Roger Ebert, and the other, also from 2010, was a mysterious case of a man who won The Price is Right’s Showcase showdown with a correct (to the exact dollar) bid, which had never happened before.
• Another casualty of time and syllabus space: A 2012 story in Rolling Stone by Josh Eells, The Secret Life of Tom Gabel.
• Most college students have read (or were asked to read) journalist Barbara Ehrenreich‘s Nickel and Dimed. (If you haven’t read it, please do. One of our era’s finest works of immersion journalism.) I wanted us to read her essay on the pink-ribbon cancer culture industry, “Smile or Die: The Bright Side of Cancer.” You can read the original Harper’s magazine version of it here. I recommend her book Bright-Sided: How Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America. (I would add: “and Journalism,” so we could talk about the uses of skepticism in this relentlessly upbeat, big-hugs, magical-thinking age.)
• Jake Silverstein’s book, Nothing Happened and Then It Did, is something I’d like to give anyone starting out on his or her first journalism job. It’s a strange book, in that it reprints some of Jake’s longform nonfiction for magazines and alternates with fictional chapters about a “Jake Silverstein,” a young journalist in pursuit of big stories in the west Texas wastelands. I would much rather that young journos with wandering hearts and an appetite for adventure read this instead of Hunter S. Thompson.
• We were supposed to read Washington Post music critic Chris Richards’s page 1 tale of the hunt to find the ruins of George Clinton and Parliament-Funkadelic’s missing “Mothership,” rumored to be buried in the kudzu jungles of suburban Maryland.
• I also wanted us to read Michael Kruse’s piece about a woman who died in her garage and whose body went undiscovered for a long time, even after the house went into foreclosure. The pop-culture angle here is difficult to determine, but I wanted us to examine the power in the details of the things we own and keep in our homes. Once you’ve read it, you really must read this.
• There’s something fun and startling about “Eating Beef Jerky at the Bodies Exhibit,” written in 2010 by Trent Moorman of The Stranger. I wanted to incorporate this piece somewhere between our talks about criticism and scene stories.
• Tony Earley’s 1998 Harper’s essay, “Somehow Form a Family,” about a childhood spent watching television (“The Brady Bunch” especially), almost made our reading assignments during the personal-essay stage. Here’s a link to the book version.
• It probably wouldn’t have been a huge hit in class, but someday check out Rebecca Brown’s “Hawthorne,” an essay about Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys, from her book American Romances.
• I had picked out the first chapter of Joshua Gamson’s “The Fabulous Sylvester,” a biography of the late, gender-bending disco singer of the ’70s/’80s. Just read the first 13 pages, “Get Ready for Me” — an amazing act of setting scene and character while describing a whole other world, in this case, that of South Central Los Angeles teenagers of the 1960s.
Also:
• More Susan Orlean — including her profile of schlock painter Thomas Kinkade. Just go ahead and get yourself a copy of The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup.
• A little more Joan Didion — pictured above in her everyday guise, smoking next to her Corvette — including the title essay from The White Album.
• Take a look at David Samuels’s magazine stories in his collection Only Love Can Break Your Heart. Likewise, check out Nathan Rabin’s The Big Rewind: A Memoir Brought to You by Pop Culture.
• I had flagged a couple of chapters to share from Tom Bissell’s Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter.
• Don’t forget Henry Allen: Going Too Far Enough (collected essays from the Washington Post) and What It Felt Like (an epic 10-part essay on the 20th century).
Also don’t forget everything else ever written. Get busy. There will be a quiz, and it will be given by everyone in the writing business who thinks they’re smarter than you.
PS: If you want to share thoughts about books, I’m on Goodreads.










The trip didn’t last long.
The Tonsil Blog’s One-Man Book Club is back together, this time at Hank’s place. (Okay, every time at Hank’s place. Isn’t a book club so much nicer with one member?)
The Ask, by Sam Lipsyte. I was gobsmacked on just about every fucking page by some painfully beautiful or hilarious or otherwise perfect sentence in this novel. I loved Home Land, too, and The Ask did not disappoint me — in fact, I feel like it surpassed Home Land.
I don’t have a whole lot specifically to say about Still Life: Adventures in Taxidermy, by Melissa Milgrom. But I should say that it was co-edited by Amazing Andrea, who edited my book, so that right there made me want to read it.
complex — One Perfect Day — where she went all over the world and gathered examples of the Bridezilla culture and then didn’t say anything. Mead’s book had an amazing cover (it was a receipt stapled to an engraved wedding invitation, see?) and yet it just fizzled and pooped all the way through. It was about something outrageous and bizarre and hilarious and heartbreaking and yet it was no fun.
All right, everything I just said? About books needing more style, more voice, more viewpoint, more artful writing? And what I 
We’ll there’s more, but not tonight. I hogged all the time and drank all the wine. The One-Man Book Club will be back soon for one-sided discussions of the following: WILSON by Daniel Clowes; NOTHING HAPPENED AND THEN IT DID by Jake Silverstein; THE IMMORTAL LIFE OF HENRIETTA LACKS by Rebecca Skloot; and THE BEDWETTER by Sarah Silverman. YES, all of those, plus three books that failed to pass the 50-page test!
Anymore, it almost seems I’d rather talk books than movies. (And if I could keep up, and people still cared about records, I’d love to talk about records.) It’s no fun to keep throwing yourself at the movies with holiday optimism, only to have them not catch you as you fall — those four movies are $100 in tickets, and I’ve never resented ticket prices, ever, even when I couldn’t afford to go to as many movies as I wanted. I’ve always felt like it was important to go, to take the good with the bad, and just enjoy movies the way they’re meant to be, in a theater. I never treated the movies with some Consumer Reports-like expectation that my money never be wasted. But these movies? Thud, thud, thud, thud. It’s Complicated probably annoyed me the most, not for the menopausal mania but for the outrageous wealth in which the characters obliviously dwelled, free of traffic and hassle (other than, well, the complicated sex stuff), where a woman just “owns a bakery” and lives on an estate and is remodeling her woefully small (read: huge) kitchen, and picking ripened tomatoes in her garden on a day which we’ve been lead to believe is late spring. I mean, I can only take so much of that sort of Hollywood fantasy where conspicuous wealth is passed off as normal, upper middle-class. Do we really go to the movies for this kind of escape? Not me. Not in THIS ECONOMY.

All these books-of-the-year and books-of-the-decade lists are out now. I’m too far behind on ’09 to make any sort of guess about what book I liked most. But I can feel some coalescence about the decade by just looking around my study. If a book stuck around from my circa-2000 apartment and made it here to my 140 square-foot retreat in 2005, and is still here today, it must’ve meant I thought it was a pretty freakin’ good read. Here are faves from the ’00s, I think. I’m sure I’ve left something out, likely because I gave my copy away to someone else to read. There has to be more to this list, and I’ll realize later “Oh, no, I left off [blank]!” but I also like the pop-quiz nature of this blog post, on which I’ll spend no more than 15 minutes throwing together a list. No particular order…
