Yah dude that Antractica thing was fucking fantastic, tho having only seen the continent in "The Thing" I am having a hard time imagining it as this new yupster socialite place.
I'm having a real hard time getting into the Romney article. Somehow that guy just exhausts me with don't-give-a-fuckness (apathy isn't really the right word here).
― Abbott, Saturday, 13 October 2007 20:53 (sixteen years ago) link
Mine hasn't come in yet ;_;
"The Spy Who Came in and Was Cold" from last month was incredible.
― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Saturday, 13 October 2007 20:54 (sixteen years ago) link
Disaster Capitalism was very good. I think it was the comparison of New Deal bowling in America to paranoid future state instead of to blank familiar unseen middle, which actually ends up being much closer to the latter.
― youn, Sunday, 14 October 2007 01:39 (sixteen years ago) link
Paranoid future state is actually the opposite of what I mean. It's being numb to things that are odd but have only to be mentioned to be quite possible, such as going on a cruise to avoid a natural disaster.
― youn, Sunday, 14 October 2007 01:46 (sixteen years ago) link
i just got my first (paper) issue in the mail the other day! i got stuck at the picture of a mink tho on like page 5 and couldn't stop laughing. sorry 'friends of teh animals' time to get a new marketing guy
― rrrobyn, Sunday, 14 October 2007 01:48 (sixteen years ago) link
oh it was on p 19 i'm sure i will read a few of the articles eventually
― rrrobyn, Sunday, 14 October 2007 01:49 (sixteen years ago) link
"my plan to disappear from station and live in a snow cave at winter's end fell through disastrously; I was found facedown in front of the fridge clutching a half-eaten five-pound summer sausage"
― rrrobyn, Sunday, 14 October 2007 01:52 (sixteen years ago) link
Yeah, I'm desperate to read the entirity of that interview.
― Z S, Sunday, 14 October 2007 02:34 (sixteen years ago) link
Where is my Harper's?
Meanwhile, I bought the Atlantic Monthly's 150th Anniversary edition and read a bunch of those "American Idea" essays on the PATH. Eughhhhh - so fucking inane.
― Hurting 2, Monday, 15 October 2007 02:13 (sixteen years ago) link
i got stuck at the picture of a mink tho on like page 5 and couldn't stop laughing. sorry 'friends of teh animals' time to get a new marketing guy
otm
― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Monday, 15 October 2007 02:43 (sixteen years ago) link
I bought the Atlantic Monthly's 150th Anniversary edition and read a bunch of those "American Idea" essays on the PATH. Eughhhhh - so fucking inane.
does this mean i should cxl my subscrip to atlantic y/n
― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Monday, 15 October 2007 02:44 (sixteen years ago) link
I don't know - I haven't read the Atlantic in a long time, but I generally don't remember most of it being anywhere near as bad as the FOB stuff in the current issue. Even the rest of this particular issue might be better.
― Hurting 2, Monday, 15 October 2007 02:54 (sixteen years ago) link
I just subscribed for the last issue and it was kinda ok. I wish Harper's was that long, but then I suppose qual would decline.
― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Monday, 15 October 2007 02:57 (sixteen years ago) link
that mcmurdo thing is some of the worst post-gonzo bullshit whoever nero is, he's sure to write a well-timed shit of a bestseller
― El Tomboto, Monday, 15 October 2007 15:38 (sixteen years ago) link
I also just resubscribed after many years away, and also got a bit stuck on the mink. I thought he was a cute enough mink, though.
― Casuistry, Monday, 15 October 2007 16:16 (sixteen years ago) link
I want to cut out that dotted line bit and tape it to my collar.
How many people even wear fur these days? I thought ermine and the color violet were the province of kings alone. And Prince, of course.
― Abbott, Monday, 15 October 2007 19:20 (sixteen years ago) link
There was some sort of retro pro-fur movement a while back, a sort of reclamation of the right to wear carcass, a few years ago, or so the NPR-ish media told me.
― Casuistry, Monday, 15 October 2007 22:14 (sixteen years ago) link
The Bush administration's forbearance as Gen. Pervez Musharraf proclaims, like [vainglorious monarch], that [famous megalomaniacal statement] recasts [open Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire to any random page, close eyes, plunge finger into text, and insert here a précis of incident described therein] as opera bouffe. The sham outrage teases forth memories of the contortions displayed by [famous Ottoman acrobat of the 15th century] or the prevarications of [obscure three-fingered gangster of the 1930s] as the Katie Courics and Wolf Blitzers of their day distracted the starving masses with [celebratory ritual performed by an island-based indigenous people] and competitions to mimic the cry of the mighty [extinct animal from the Cretaceous period].
Lewis Lapham Mad Libs! How to write the sentence he has been redrafting for 40 years.
― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Wednesday, 14 November 2007 01:40 (sixteen years ago) link
his column on how "Iraq is just like the housing bubble" was so awful.
― milo z, Wednesday, 14 November 2007 01:42 (sixteen years ago) link
Even when I first subscribed to Harper's in college and was still in awe of anything liberal I hated Lapham.
― Hurting 2, Wednesday, 14 November 2007 01:47 (sixteen years ago) link
Has anyone read Lapham's Quarterly?
That Mad Lib is fucking golden, as are the mailing instructions.
― Abbott, Wednesday, 14 November 2007 01:48 (sixteen years ago) link
I think the guy is o-kay.
The column is spot-on. No one else uses so much erudition and learning to say so little.
― Hurting 2, Wednesday, 14 November 2007 01:51 (sixteen years ago) link
I'll try to condense his stuff:
St. Andrews: Although arranged like St. Andrews, the course at North Berwick presents a wider variance of hazards, and possibly because of the names of the holes ("Gate," "Perfection," "Pit"), what little I could remember of John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress came suddenly to mind in the elegiac light of a slowly ebbing sunset. I played the round in the company of two other solitary golfers on the hole ahead and the hole behind, three wayfarers set forth on the Scots' equivalent of the road to Canterbury, each of us in turn raising the flag of hope for the fellow pilgrim who maybe had come thus far without having fallen afoul, at least not yet, of Worldly Wiseman or Giant Despair.
Condensed: St. Andrews golf course left me in reverie.
― Abbott, Wednesday, 14 November 2007 01:53 (sixteen years ago) link
I had a hard time even parsing this one:
Extended King Richard analogy:
When King Richard the Lionheart joined the Third Crusade at Acre in 1191 and there failed to find the treasure promised by God, he insisted that the infidels had swallowed their jewels and gold coins in order to deny him the reward owing to his royal majesty and Christian virtue. His companions, less discreet than the ones currently for rent in Basra and Tikrit, cut open the stomachs of 3,000 Muslims in the search for truth, which, in the event, proved as determined, if eventually as disappointing, as the Bush Administration's quest for the thermonuclear genie in Saddam Hussein's magic lamp.
Condensed: You can't eat things totemically, esp. if the qualities you want aren't there in the first place.
― Abbott, Wednesday, 14 November 2007 01:56 (sixteen years ago) link
"Pretensions to Empire" excerpt:
The train from Paris to Brussels passes through fields sown for 2,000 years with the seed of war, and on the way north last February 1 to the opening sessions of this year's European Parliament, I was reminded of the brightly beribboned armies—Saxon, Roman, Norman, English, French, Spanish, Austrian, German, and American—that had enriched the soil with the compost of human glory.
Condensed: I thought about a lot of dead people on a train.
― Abbott, Wednesday, 14 November 2007 01:57 (sixteen years ago) link
"Choir of Prostitutes":
When I see Hillary Clinton and Rudy Giuliani being bundled around the country in a flutter of media consultants fitting words into their mouths, I think of the makeup artists adjusting the ribbons in Emperor Nero's hair before sending him into an amphitheater to sing with a choir of prostitutes.
Hilary & Guiliani – oh, you two!
― Abbott, Wednesday, 14 November 2007 01:58 (sixteen years ago) link
i have a real hate/love for this guy
― rrrobyn, Wednesday, 14 November 2007 02:02 (sixteen years ago) link
"Brightly beribboned armies [...] that had enriched the soil with the compost of human glory" He's actually Terry Pratchett, isn't he?
― Øystein, Wednesday, 14 November 2007 03:12 (sixteen years ago) link
got renewal notice in the mail (why don't they just email? eesh. maybe i check 'no' on that box?) and considering that i have put my last few issues of the mag in a pile of 'to be read' i had to think a little abt renewing. then i remembered that the reason i subscribed in the first place was b/c of the online archives. and right now i am reading an article about 'social life in russia' from 1889! it is great! so ok harper's you have yr renewal.
― rrrobyn, Sunday, 24 August 2008 13:58 (fifteen years ago) link
Fuk, yeah the archives. I totally haven't taken advantage of those and now I've been thinking about not renewing. I've just gotten tired of the formulaic "THE COMING CRISIS OF _____ [detail from Garden of Earthly Delights]" covers. The last straw for me was the contagious Tazmanian Devil cancer that will kill us all.
― Hurting 2, Sunday, 24 August 2008 14:55 (fifteen years ago) link
bahahahahahahaha, that is kind of true. But they always have something fun and unexpected, too, like that recent thing on the Magic Olympics.
― Abbott, Sunday, 24 August 2008 19:02 (fifteen years ago) link
WHY (poitician running for office) WILL FUXOR TEH WORLD. Glad you took on Giuliani and Romney in the past year – mad challops, bros.
This makes me want to create a Harper's Mad Libs.
― Abbott, Sunday, 24 August 2008 19:03 (fifteen years ago) link
I've just gotten tired of the formulaic "THE COMING CRISIS OF _____ [detail from Garden of Earthly Delights]"
Yeah I tend to ignore them and just do the Readings and Fiction and Criticism sections. Sometimes the Postcards section is a real gem too, like that one from a couple months ago about the crust punks floating the Mississippi.
― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Sunday, 24 August 2008 20:56 (fifteen years ago) link
the Notebooks vary widely from STFU dumbass (the one about paying taxes to blow shit up) to OTM (public deference to high office)
Still better than when they were all written by Lapham, I guess
― milo z, Sunday, 24 August 2008 21:17 (fifteen years ago) link
Ach, the newest issue (Jan. '09 – THE FUTURE) is kind of the worst. A 3-page index of reruns about George Bush, and all the articles are bleak retrospectives about "damn if the past eight years weren't balls p.s. the world is going to end & we're fuxored). Oh shit was it the worst issue.
― Abbott of the Trapezoid Monks (Abbott), Monday, 15 December 2008 18:56 (fifteen years ago) link
As Rick Johnson once wrote, "Avoiding what subject?"
― If Timi Yuro would be still alive, most other singers could shut up, Monday, 15 December 2008 19:08 (fifteen years ago) link
the article about Saakashvili + Georgia was good, i thought? as someone who knows very little about the region. i can't even look at that Bush + the economy infographic, though; it makes me want to die.
― horseshoe, Monday, 15 December 2008 19:16 (fifteen years ago) link
i liked reading the dfw eulogies in the 'readings' section
― beyonc'e (max), Monday, 15 December 2008 19:17 (fifteen years ago) link
i mean didnt "like" but appreciated
yes i liked those, too; saunders made me tear up. so did delillo, actually.
― horseshoe, Monday, 15 December 2008 19:18 (fifteen years ago) link
ya. i hope i can have ppl who are as articulate and intelligent speak at my funeral.
― beyonc'e (max), Monday, 15 December 2008 19:21 (fifteen years ago) link
also good source to mine for my modern authors fanfic
― beyonc'e (max), Monday, 15 December 2008 19:22 (fifteen years ago) link
"damn if the past eight years weren't balls p.s. the world is going to end & we're fuxored
this is every issue of the last year and a half imo
― so i said let me HOOS the beats and steen (BIG HOOS aka the steendriver), Monday, 15 December 2008 19:25 (fifteen years ago) link
I'll def have to stop at the bookstore & read the DFW pieces though.
Agreed on the suckage of latest issue.
By the way, Abbott, to answer your question from a year ago about Lapham's Quarterly, I LOVE IT. They keep getting better as they go on, and the latest issue, "Ways of Learning", is their best yet.
― Z S, Monday, 15 December 2008 19:38 (fifteen years ago) link
Nice!
― Abbott of the Trapezoid Monks (Abbott), Monday, 15 December 2008 20:09 (fifteen years ago) link
guys i want a mag subscription, do i get
--harper's--nyer--atlantic--other (suggest, plz!)
― a perfect urkel (gbx), Thursday, 15 October 2009 15:24 (fourteen years ago) link
nyer has some good stuff sometimes but since it's a weekly it piles up all over the place but you feel guilty about just throwing away old copies so soon you have old copies of the nyer all over the place like some kind of urbane hobo
― congratulations (n/a), Thursday, 15 October 2009 15:25 (fourteen years ago) link
that is what happened to me with the economist
― a perfect urkel (gbx), Thursday, 15 October 2009 15:26 (fourteen years ago) link
Yeah the Brautigan bio piece was a surprise to me, too! Not done w/that yet. I wonder if the book itself is worth the commitment? I was once such a Brautigan maniac that I tried to dress exactly like him and everything (teenager).
― I wish every slot machine had EAT THE RICH printed on it (Crabbits), Sunday, 25 November 2012 00:15 (eleven years ago) link
You'd think I'd try to dress like the LADIES on his cover, but: no.
― I wish every slot machine had EAT THE RICH printed on it (Crabbits), Sunday, 25 November 2012 00:16 (eleven years ago) link
Brautigan's death bums me out so bad. His stuff meant so fuckin much to me back when
― too many encores (underrated aerosmith bootlegs I have owned), Sunday, 25 November 2012 00:51 (eleven years ago) link
ha ha no dressing like RB is way better. tbh i feel like everything other than affecting the half-haunted expression is a sideshow though; i have a picture of myself outside the presidio library & all it does is enumerate the differences between us. i haven't looked at the review, yet (i dug up a times piece, too, cause given that i'm not about to sit down with a 900 page book & make headway with it i might as well soak up some stuff other people have skimmed from it), but i had weird experiences with the other couple of Brautigan bios; his daughter's was the one i took to best (though never finished), just cause she got with the write-endearingly-like-Richard-Brautigan-did thing, not even in voice but just in vignette & drift. i don't know if i want to read a really long brautigan bio or not.
― absurdly pro-D (schlump), Sunday, 25 November 2012 00:52 (eleven years ago) link
his last couple books of poetry, the sad japanese stuff (partic june 30th, june 30th, & that last novel that i can't remember the name of (wait, an unfortunate woman?, right?), where he isn't even trying to map any fictional distance onto the life he's writing, are so so sad. there's so much empty space in them. all really great, just kinda hard to work through, particularly with how funny anything earlier is.
― absurdly pro-D (schlump), Sunday, 25 November 2012 00:54 (eleven years ago) link
I haven't read them in a long time, and I wonder what I'd think now - but when I read Willard and His Bowling Trophies and Sombrero Fallout I loved them, a lot, and couldn't get why people thought he'd lost it. To me it seemed like his humor'd just gotten darker. Willard in particular could practically be a Coen brothers comedy.
― too many encores (underrated aerosmith bootlegs I have owned), Sunday, 25 November 2012 00:58 (eleven years ago) link
oh man i haven't read willard. there are maybe ten of salinger's 22 stories i've never read, & i think i just like knowing that there's still some salinger out there for me in the world, once in a while when i think of him. a bunch of libraries i've belonged to have had reserve copies of the few brautigan novels i haven't read - the genre-y stuff, i think, hawkline monster, willard, &c - & i think it's just comforting knowing i can go drink from that well when i want to. i turn reading into such a sad aspirational hassle & to read one of his books is so pleasurable.
sombrero fallout is one of my favs. it's so funny. i have been thinking about this guy a little recently because he's the closest thing i have to the pile of records inseparable from past relationships; the books have figured pretty centrally w/most everyone i dated, either by describing things or else because of us reading the books together & stuff. i can't imagine having read him without fastening him to some part of my life.
― absurdly pro-D (schlump), Sunday, 25 November 2012 01:09 (eleven years ago) link
you didnt know jamie foxx was a comic?!?!?!?
― max, Sunday, 25 November 2012 15:08 (eleven years ago) link
ha, no? like he wasn't on my radar until ray, he wasn't any part of the fabric of me growing up or watching tv or anything. jamie foxx as a person always kinda weirds me out & i'm still soaking up what this new layer of the onion means about him. if there are crucial jamie foxx '90s youtubes i should be watching let me know.
― absurdly pro-D (schlump), Sunday, 25 November 2012 16:28 (eleven years ago) link
haha i guess the jamie foxx show wasnt as ubiquitous as had imagined at the time
― max, Sunday, 25 November 2012 17:34 (eleven years ago) link
i was in the uk, we were watching gritty dramas about the marital tensions of coalminers & their wives, there was no room for this humour about hollywood & crushing on prince
― absurdly pro-D (schlump), Sunday, 25 November 2012 17:41 (eleven years ago) link
Guy who wrote the Brautigan book also wrote the book Angel Heart is based on, Fallen Angel, I think, and some kind of historical whodunit featuring Arthur Conan Doyle and Kit Carson, maybe. Counterpoint is a pretty classy imprint, think I may have started a go-nowhere thread about it.
― Roadside Prisunic (James Redd and the Blecchs), Sunday, 25 November 2012 17:56 (eleven years ago) link
Falling Angel. Conan Doyle and Houdini.
― Roadside Prisunic (James Redd and the Blecchs), Sunday, 25 November 2012 18:00 (eleven years ago) link
decent piece from the publisher: http://harpers.org/blog/2013/03/obamas-real-political-program/
― (The Other) J.D. (J.D.), Friday, 22 March 2013 19:02 (eleven years ago) link
i really loved the ehrenreich excerpt
― mustread guy (schlump), Saturday, 8 March 2014 18:20 (ten years ago) link
Doug Henwood's Hillary takedown is very good and fair-minded, although I'm not sure what it accomplishes since I feel like a lot of people already don't love her and will vote for her anyway in the seeming absence of other options.
The ISIS article is great, maybe best thing I've read on the topic so far.
― my jaw left (Hurting 2), Friday, 24 October 2014 06:00 (nine years ago) link
technological workplace monitoring article freaking me out
i just subscribed to thisthere is this kind of shimmering vein of newness, presentness, running through some of the best harper's things, something i can't find elsewherethe list of asmr requests last issue, the piece on tech libertarians, just fragmentsreally a nice part of my month
― tender is the late-night daypart (schlump), Sunday, 22 February 2015 02:00 (nine years ago) link
&
did anyone read the Values-of-a-Solitary-Life article
i kinda found it simultaneously unbearable, for its outlook, & valuable, for its frame of reference
― tender is the late-night daypart (schlump), Tuesday, 31 March 2015 01:37 (nine years ago) link
Solitude is overrated
Believe me
― 龜, Tuesday, 31 March 2015 02:27 (nine years ago) link
really feel youkind of a hard piece to read occuyping some of the same spaces as the author without having made lemonade from them
― tender is the late-night daypart (schlump), Tuesday, 31 March 2015 02:58 (nine years ago) link
i wonder just how many pieces lewis lapham has written decrying american politics/society with comparisons to the fall of rome (republic or empire, take your pick)
not that he's *wrong*, but it's a very specific and tiresome hammer he wields. mixed it up by going with the greeks this last time, at least
― mookieproof, Monday, 26 October 2015 23:15 (eight years ago) link
i couldn't even bear to start that article.
― slam dunk, Tuesday, 27 October 2015 00:48 (eight years ago) link
lol, I haven't read him in years but I feel like that was every "Easy Chair" (or whatever they called the editor's column at the time) he ever wrote. He seemed completely useless to me as a writer and thinker.
― on entre O.K. on sort K.O. (man alive), Wednesday, 28 October 2015 03:43 (eight years ago) link
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CSlAnIbWoAAGoVF.png
― mookieproof, Friday, 30 October 2015 16:29 (eight years ago) link
smdh
"When journalists themselves wage campaigns to suppress the writing of other journalists, and intend to destroy a magazine for not toeing their ideological line, you can see how free speech truly is on the line." https://t.co/BjFbmBgqHJ— Harper's Magazine (@Harpers) January 12, 2018
― mookieproof, Friday, 12 January 2018 20:59 (six years ago) link
🙄
― The Bridge of Ban Louis J (silby), Friday, 12 January 2018 21:23 (six years ago) link
There are some judgments in that piece that bypass "right-wing columnist" and go straight to "failed human"
― Chuck_Tatum, Friday, 12 January 2018 21:29 (six years ago) link
https://harpers.org/a-letter-on-justice-and-open-debate/
dud
― mellon collie and the infinite bradness (BradNelson), Tuesday, 7 July 2020 22:21 (three years ago) link
the motives of these signatories aside, there's no attempt (by some) to establish thoughtcrime in the name of progressivism right now, huh? Check.
― brooklyn suicide cult (Dr Morbius), Tuesday, 7 July 2020 22:24 (three years ago) link
the motives of these signatories aside
sorry can't extricate letter from motives of signatories
― mellon collie and the infinite bradness (BradNelson), Tuesday, 7 July 2020 22:28 (three years ago) link
which likely vary except in Wokeland
― brooklyn suicide cult (Dr Morbius), Tuesday, 7 July 2020 22:34 (three years ago) link
that's where i live
― mellon collie and the infinite bradness (BradNelson), Tuesday, 7 July 2020 22:35 (three years ago) link
On the positive side, my homie wrote this one:https://harpers.org/archive/2020/07/this-is-not-a-test-disaster-city-texas/
― change display name (Jordan), Tuesday, 7 July 2020 23:06 (three years ago) link