A list of demands for my man of letters.

I'm currently reading "Of Human Bondage" and it's converging strangely with the new Harpers'* I am concurrently reading. Last article in Harper's is a review of a book about William Hazlitt, and the first line is "From Samuel Johnson to Christopher Hitchens..." so you know I'm down from jump street. Along with the Maugham book I took out from the library was a Samuel Johnson collection and a fictionalized biography of said-same Dr. J. What do these guys--and Susan Sontag--have in common? They are "men of letters": "an intriguing combination of critic, sage, scholar, journalist, and dilettante...a public intellectual...combining the erudite with the popular." I also think of bell hooks. I often think of bell hooks: she is my north star: who also has (apparently like this Hazlitt they are talking about) an abiding empathy, the "rigorous and imaginative compassion" of DFW.

Where I'm going with this is--well, first things first, forget astronaut or ballerina, I want to be a man of letters. I'm also wondering what a man of letters actually does in the media-determinationist post-capitalist world in which we find ourselves. So often the revolutionary thinkers were those that undermined prevailing ideas, but as we now operate in a near constant state of advertising-driven idea-flipping, bombarded by letters, covered in silly letters, awash in loud letters, well then. My hope is that the fluffy icing will always be fluffy icing, and that the sharp mind of a pure heart will always cut to the center of discourse. We can only assume the best of a cake or cake metaphor.

The "Of Human Bondage" thing comes in for illustration: how I reminisce for a time of simple class warfare and prim Victorian oppression, for I would be a hipster libertine. Now, however, I find myself a true Catholic in a world of easy want and insincerity. I blame Ian MacKaye and Kurt Vonnegut both.

The mid-twenties narrator, Phillip, he's running into every example of foolish libertines and delusional adherents of the Good Life and I'm at this ridiculous job where I just learned they are teaching "Criminal Thinking Errors" and Freudian constructs to the boys on the fourth floor, the ones going to big kid jail soon. What about a little love, people, what if the skills you need to steal a car and lie to the cops are the same skills needed to get a good job and run an investment firm? Where is the art in life, the right for everyone to feel the smug compassion that is my daily fuel? Are there people who still can't see that their misbehavior is your gentlemanliness, that their delinquency is your success?

My demands: I demand a man of letters who can finish the ideas I start. I want no Demitri Martin-type shorthand replacing insight, but neither will the cruelness of this world lead my man of letters to kill himself or become a pickled and fusty conservative. I want workaday imagination, vigorous compassion, and enough sarcasm to keep him or her alive for the duration.

*This issue's short story contains scenes around Toledo and is called 'the Blade.' It's Denis Johnson-reminiscent and a silent shout-out to Toledo: it's both these things!