French stuff

Édouard Levé recently came to the attention of the American literary crowd after excerpts of his newly translated works appeared in Harper’s and The Paris Review.

Shortly after he submitted “Suicide” to his editor, Levé killed himself. I remembered an anecdote from “Le Mythe de Sisyphe” where Camus told of a writer who committed suicide in the hopes that it would draw attention to his book; it did, but the book was deemed terrible. I would probably have had similar doubts about Levé’s merits as a writer had he not been co-signed by two institutions I respect.

Though I had never heard of Levé, the little I knew about him from those magazines was enough incentive for me to run over to the bookstore. They didn’t have “Autoportrait,” the one I wanted, so I settled for this one. I don’t even want to know what the cashier must have thought of me, buying a book called “Suicide” five minutes before closing time. Perhaps a desperate soul’s last-minute attempt to find something more dramatic than an all too conventional plunge from a bridge into a river’s cold water or from a quai onto tracks.

An overall great read, and not nearly as depressing as the title might suggest. Every sentence has a stand-alone quality to it. No doubt Levé would have been a pleasure to follow on Twitter.

McDonald’s

OK, we get it. The people in your commercials are mere reflections of your target market of young, healthy-looking vegan types looking for fresh salad.

But where are the three-chinned men and women who go through the drive-thru because they can’t fit in the tables’ seats? The diaper-wearing elderly who sit there all day with a coffee and muffin, poring over the contents of the new Publi-Sac? The homeless who ask for their panhandling cups to be refilled? The black kids (who now apparently shop at H&M and American Apparel—the days of gangsta rap a distant memory) who meet up in large groups and order double cheeseburgers in exchange for being allowed to stay an hour or two while they loudly and obnoxiously discuss the dumbest shit?

Side Dish

Whenever I use BBM, I feel like I’m getting ripped off. I feel like there’s someone at RIM taking advantage of me, worse even than in that story your girl friend once told you about the night she was stuck in a closet with her uncle.

The only reason I ever got a BlackBerry was the promise of a better world, a world of full disclosure of my friends’ message-checking tendencies—BBM. And all I got in return for trusting them were two stupid letters, D and R, letters that tell me that my message has been delivered and then received. That’s real nice, real thoughtful of them and everything, but shouldn’t I be given more access into my friends’ privacy? There should be exponential Ds and Rs—R^R, for instance—so I know when a person knows that I’ve seen that they’ve received my message. I paid for that intrusive all-access kind of shit.

Resolutions

The only thing Facebook is good for is accommodating chicks after a night at the club. They wake up in the morning, down a glass of water, and, clutching their iPhones, smile with quiet pride as they scroll past names and numbers they only vaguely remember. I wonder how many my besties got, they might ask themselves.

Before you can wake up from the dream she’s starring in, the girl you drunk texted your name to at 4 a.m. is already skimming through your pictures, recalling the bad breath that accompanied your pickup lines, the ones you got from that movie you hoped she hadn’t seen. Cloudy flashbacks of your face start to clear up. Within seconds, she can validate her reason for giving you her number, or conclude that her taste in men was blurred by one drink too many—the one you bought her—and, with very little effort, she can avoid any post-club “dates” with you. That’s the convenience of the Facebook Era—the ease with which you can rid yourself of inconveniences before you even get out of bed, before you even start a new day.

We have a new year ahead of us and a new year calls for a resolution list. But enough with the over-ambitious resolutions that never amount to shit. I’m never going to go to the gym seven days a week and audition for a spot on Jersey Shore. This year, my resolution will have immediate results. I’m deleting my Facebook. So I won’t be able to accommodate chicks, so I won’t know the birthdays of my acquaintances—so what? I’ve come to hate it more than almost anything and still I go back to it every day. Take the News Feed, for example. Why would I want to know who my “friends” just became “friends” with? Unless he’s going to hook me up, I couldn’t care less that some guy I met at a party three years ago is now friends with a hot brunette.

Like, shit, all the changes Facebook brought to its website through the years and there is STILL a “poke” feature? Does anyone really use that thing? And, if so, I need names ASAP. Anyone who pokes people on Facebook should have an automatic restraining order issued against him, with a notification sent to the local police chief’s account and shit. For all I know, these are the same people whose faces are on that channel that shows pictures of wanted murderers, pedophiles, and people who stole dirty magazines from a dépanneur because they were too embarrassed to pay for them at the counter.

Who knows, maybe sometime in two years I’ll decide to come back to Facebook and it won’t be the hub of degeneracy it was when I left it. Or maybe our society will have dwindled further down, so low that it will have adopted a new medium for social networking, something more in tune with the current generation’s increasing desire for social exhibitionism.

Something called Pussybildungsroman perhaps, “face” and “book” now being considered too bland and not public enough, where people post photos of their genitals several times a week and tag the last person they slept with. Obviously, club chicks will have 3,532 tagged photos, while frail-looking dudes with acne problems will have one or two, at most. And, inevitably, creatine-using guys who take full advantage of their tanning salon memberships and wear extra-small sprinkle-covered Ed Hardy t-shirts will create gimmick accounts. Because they’re going to need to be tagging something to prove the existence of all those hot broads they’re always lying about.

+++++

I love how this was the first thing I read in 2011. Elif Batuman on why criticism matters.

New Neighbours

I got home tonight and my parents told me we were getting new neighbours. OK, I said. Like it matters who I occasionally have to wave to politely, or who has to act like it’s essential to have meaningless small talk meant to “catch up” whenever we have the misfortune of running into each other. They’re Indian, they said. Oh, I said. My reaction partly caused by the prospect of having to constantly spray the house with Febreeze to drown out the curry smell, and partly because, well, that really is news for us. The truth is that we don’t have Indians around here—at least on our street we don’t. There’s no shortage of Italians, though. They’ve been to Italy once but they’ll talk about it passionately and endlessly to anyone who’ll listen. You can’t say they’re not proud of their heritage. Anyway, for now it’s only one Indian guy. Maybe he wanted to ensure a smoother transition for us. I like him already. Apparently, he just ordered his wife from India. I thought that was fucking awesome. Anyone who signs up for marriage with a chick he’s never even seen is the type of guy I want to hang out with in Vegas. I’m already looking forward to hearing the newlyweds’ first argument through the walls. “You filthy whore! You look nothing like the girl on the picture your parents sent me!”