Way ahead of it's time, this piece is extremely relevant with the likes of Unsound Rags and others charging for clothing worn by actual workers to sell at a high price to people that do not actually labor.
I'm a sucker for the doorstops: Joyce, Proust, Musil, Mann, Tolstoy, Anthony Powell, Fielding etc Yes Please! But I'm a bit ambivalent about The Recognitions, very brainy, and rather funny in places (Pynchon seems to have been a fan), but a trifle...overelaborated sometimes. Too many notes! maybe....But no less a brainiac than Cynthia Ozick in (Metaphor and Memory) comes down on Gaddis's side, so it doesn't surprise me that Cintra does too.
Hoo boy -- your lovely evocation of the Derby jacket brought back a strange episode from my early forays into thrift e-commerce. In the late 90s, having spent formative time in SF and Oakland, I too developed a fixation on that quilted essential of proletarian chic, a jacket that somehow found favor with skinheads, cholos, and Ice Cube, and drove two of my stupider online misadventures. The first was accidentally bidding $40,000 for one on eBay—which triggered a heart-stopping plunge as I watched the bid go through, thinking I was now on the hook for that sum (yes, ok boomer, though I was 30 at the time). The other was connecting with a faceless dealer in those jackets, from whom I bought one after a friendly email back and forth before a casual Google of dude’s username revealed that he was also a chapter leader in a West Coast white-supremacist movement and unwise enough to use that same username to advertise for anonymous rough-sex hook-ups with other men in a motel near said chapter’s HQ. (I’m not making any of this up.) The cherry on top of this whole fiasco that, in my attempt to forward my discovery to my girlfriend I accidentally cc-ed dude himself, under a subject heading line “I guess Nazi-ism isn’t his only hobby!” Another heart-stopping plunge as I noticed what I’d done, followed by yet another when I received a response. He wrote a strikingly calm and amiable message: Hey, no problem. Totally understand, I got an old lady too, etc. I’m not sure what the lesson here is—street fashion contains multitudes?—but there it is.
2nd Gaddis reference today after years of radio silence
Way ahead of it's time, this piece is extremely relevant with the likes of Unsound Rags and others charging for clothing worn by actual workers to sell at a high price to people that do not actually labor.
I'm a sucker for the doorstops: Joyce, Proust, Musil, Mann, Tolstoy, Anthony Powell, Fielding etc Yes Please! But I'm a bit ambivalent about The Recognitions, very brainy, and rather funny in places (Pynchon seems to have been a fan), but a trifle...overelaborated sometimes. Too many notes! maybe....But no less a brainiac than Cynthia Ozick in (Metaphor and Memory) comes down on Gaddis's side, so it doesn't surprise me that Cintra does too.
Hoo boy -- your lovely evocation of the Derby jacket brought back a strange episode from my early forays into thrift e-commerce. In the late 90s, having spent formative time in SF and Oakland, I too developed a fixation on that quilted essential of proletarian chic, a jacket that somehow found favor with skinheads, cholos, and Ice Cube, and drove two of my stupider online misadventures. The first was accidentally bidding $40,000 for one on eBay—which triggered a heart-stopping plunge as I watched the bid go through, thinking I was now on the hook for that sum (yes, ok boomer, though I was 30 at the time). The other was connecting with a faceless dealer in those jackets, from whom I bought one after a friendly email back and forth before a casual Google of dude’s username revealed that he was also a chapter leader in a West Coast white-supremacist movement and unwise enough to use that same username to advertise for anonymous rough-sex hook-ups with other men in a motel near said chapter’s HQ. (I’m not making any of this up.) The cherry on top of this whole fiasco that, in my attempt to forward my discovery to my girlfriend I accidentally cc-ed dude himself, under a subject heading line “I guess Nazi-ism isn’t his only hobby!” Another heart-stopping plunge as I noticed what I’d done, followed by yet another when I received a response. He wrote a strikingly calm and amiable message: Hey, no problem. Totally understand, I got an old lady too, etc. I’m not sure what the lesson here is—street fashion contains multitudes?—but there it is.
Heh heh. Very fond of this gem. Your sentences here are particularly rich with chewy, caramelized goodness and lotsa salty crystals.