Salon.com > essay

When neoliberalism exploded

Sat, 09 Mar 2013 14:00:00 +0000

HOW DID IT HAPPEN? In the early 1970s, Western governments, academia, and the media understood the relationship between the state and the market according to the same liberal consensus that had been in place since the end of World War II. During what is commonly called the “golden age of capitalism,” government, capital, and labor had reached the uneasy agreement that markets produced social ruin when left to their own devices. The state was needed to mitigate inequality, to provide basic services, and — through a combination of monetary and fiscal means — to even out capitalism’s boom-bust cycle. By the early 1980s, all that had changed: the British and American governments, joined by large segments of the media and intelligentsia, declared that the state was the root of social evil, that free markets could do nearly everything better than government, and that the economic crises of the past were the result of state meddling.

Keith Gessen, Nathaniel Rich: I’m sorry I trashed your novels

Mon, 04 Mar 2013 01:00:00 +0000

I write. It is what I have always done, searching for what Robert Frost called "a momentary stay against confusion."

But I want more than just wisdom -- every writer does, outside the most hopeless of naïfs. Like most of my fellow scribes, I also yearn for fame, greatness and immortality, preferably in that order. Allow me to be immodest: I would like to write the best thing about Brooklyn since William Styron's "Sophie's Choice" and a campus novel to rival Donna Tartt's "The Secret History." I would also like to write a play and perhaps some poetry, if there is time.

Let me go further: If you do not want your own version of the above, if you are indeed a reasonable and/or responsible young man or woman, then literature is not for you. If you have a compelling personal story to tell, tell it to a therapist. An MBA will do you far more good than an MFA. Pursue writing only if you are pathologically unable to pursue anything else. Otherwise, consider advertising.

William Faulkner once said that the artist is "a creature driven by demons -- he usually doesn't know why they chose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why." The demons chose wisely in his case, yet you and I would be foolish to count on their discretion. I say that as someone who has tried and failed to publish a novel for a good decade, despite efforts that any dispassionate observer would consider impressive, if not outright troubling.

Fearing fear itself

Wed, 31 Oct 2012 21:00:00 +0000

I slept in the attic. I was put up there when I was 5 and my sister was born and she took over my room. The attic is a haven in a lot of ways — I am atop my family and can hear them moving below; I have a window seat and I can look down on the world, see the kids playing kick the can, riding their banana-seated bikes down the hill, ringing their bells, and I can watch the old people leaning into each other, walking hand in hand after dinner.

I soon realize, though, that the world doesn’t look back up. No one can see me. I have just seen “Beauty and the Beast” at Wolf Trap, the performing arts center in Washington, D.C., where I have also seen “The Music Man,” “Hello Dolly” and “The Phantom Tollbooth.” I loved these productions so much that I have signed up for a drama workshop here. But when it’s my turn to improvise onstage, I giggle with so much self-consciousness, I am told by the drama instructor to get off the stage. “You need to get into your character,” she says. “Who are you going to be?” Alas, I have always, only, been myself.

The 4:30 p.m. matinee

Wed, 31 Oct 2012 21:00:00 +0000

The 4:30 movie often terrified me as a child; it seemed that every other day they showed "Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte," or "Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?" A friend and I would sit in my den or her den, eating Yodels and feeling a sick, spreading terror as we watched, even though the production values of these movies were poor, and the TV screen was always exceedingly small. (I am amazed, looking back, that we had time to fit in an entire movie after school; today's kids are so riddled with work and busywork that the idea of so much movie-watching seems pretty surreal. On my college applications, in the space for "extra-curricular activities," I could've written: "Bette Davis.") I was relatedly scared by the feeling of being trapped that these movies engendered in me. Trapped in a relationship, trapped in a mansion, trapped in obsessive love — these felt like very adult problems, and it didn't seem all that far-fetched that one day I too might become demented with love or hatred, and would eventually go from being a Yodel-eating suburban girl to an old woman who dressed like a baby. I guess I thought that not only were these movies lurid; maybe adulthood was lurid too.