He had his high school tassel hanging from his rear view mirror. My oldest back when he was 19 was pulled over for being visibly young and driving a brand new car more than 20 miles from where it registered after mid. Well, I, an essentially optimistic white male, was just joking at lunch today about the existential crisis implied by shouting into the void when your microphone is turned off in a conference call. I would say that the writer, Roxane Gay, is trying to make it sound like society killed her brother and wants us to believe that her happy, vital, extroverted brother, who refused to make himself small, was trembling inside. The son was raised by Joel, a single father, who appears to have had a successful business career. His sister says so in the Times and in her tweets. There is a scattered amount of pure speculation on the internet-including speculation that Joel was younger than 43. But nothing else in the story or on the internet confirms that idea.
Althouse's choice makes it sound like brother Joel was killed by the cops. Throw over your man, I say, and think Althouse plucked a weird paragraph out of a loving sister's tribute to her 43 year-old deceased brother. “Look here Vita - throw over your man, and we’ll go to Hampton Court and dine on the river together and walk in the garden in the moonlight and come home late and have a bottle of wine and get tipsy, and I’ll tell you all the things I have in my head, millions, myriads - They won’t stir by day, only by dark on the river. I must, then, repeat continually that we are for ever sundered: – and yet, while I breathe and think I must love him.” I believe he is of mine – I am sure he is, – I feel akin to him, – I understand the language of his countenance and movements: though rank and wealth sever us widely, I have something in my brain and heart, in my blood and nerves, that assimilates me mentally to him. “He is not to them what he is to me,” I thought: “he is not of their kind. Go on, you old bee charmer, tell me a good tall tale.” “You’re just a bee charmer, Idgie Threadgoode. Whatever happen, whatever you do, I love you.” “I saw no shadow of another parting from her.”
“And Ruth said, Intreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God: Where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be buried: the LORD do so to me, and more also, if ought but death part thee and me.” Gay-ish quotes from classic literature that sum up how Nicole and self feel about this news: We’ll tell you how as The Butter launch approaches. You may follow her on Twitter here, if you do not already (I highly recommend it).Ĭan I pitch The Butter? Yes. Believe me when I tell you that we know she is too good for us.)
She is also the author of the books Ayiti, An Untamed State, Bad Feminist, and Hunger, forthcoming from Harper in 2016.īoth An Untamed Stateand Bad Feministhave made it onto the New York Times bestsellers list, incidentally. Roxane Gay’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Best American Mystery Stories 2014, Best American Short Stories 2012, Best Sex Writing 2012, A Public Space, McSweeney’s, Tin House, Oxford American, American Short Fiction, West Branch, Virginia Quarterly Review, NOON, The New York Times Book Review, Bookforum, Time, The Los Angeles Times, The Nation, The Rumpus, Salon, and many others. Would you care to be more specific? Roxane says it will “focus on cultural criticism and personal essays that make readers think and feel.” What will this particular vertical be like? WHATEVER ROXANE WANTS IT TO BE. If you were raised Christian, think of it as part of a Trinity eternally begotten of the Toast, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, one in Being with the Toast. Wait, is FX owned by FOX? I ought to know this. What is a vertical, exactly? Oh, it’s a bit hard to describe - it’s part of our company, but it’s also its own thing. She’s officially starting on October 15th, and there will be plenty more details to come, but in the meantime please join me in dancing excitedly about the room. You cannot possibly understand how bad I am at keeping news to myself, nor what a toll keeping this particular news took on my frail and mortal frame, but please share in my joy: Roxane Gay is coming to The Toast, where she will be running our very first vertical, The Butter.