LITERARY - TWO NEW WORD THINGS

By viceland

New York Tyrant Issue 3
Ed. Giancarlo DiTrapano

Hey. This is the exact lit journal I have been pining for ever since McSweeney's bit the boredom bullet. It's perfect in-between book and magazine size, and the cover of the last issue was a painting of James Spader from Pretty In Pink that caused literally every girl I'm friends with to buy a copy on spec. Then when you open it and read the pages, it's a bunch of stories by young folks like Rachel Sherman and older folks like Robert Gluck and dead folks like Breece D'J Pancake and they're all weirdly written, but really dark instead of precious and cloying. There's even a Jonathan Ames one that didn't make my throat clench shut in rage (I think because it's only about two paragraphs long).

The only downer is that a lot of the authors do that thing that they're teaching new authors to do where each sentence you're supposed to repeat something like 40 percent of the words you used in the previous sentence. I just spent about 30 minutes trying to come up with a joke about how obnoixious that is while using 40 percent of the words from the last sentence, but I couldn't pull it off. So, granted it's tough, but still obnox.
TERRY MOORE

PS though: Good luck reading this issue on the train. For all the eye daggers I've caught presumably on account of the cover, you'd think I was leafing through a copy of Mein Kampf with a Hello Kitty bookmark.

The Chemical Muse: Drug Use and the Roots of Western Civilization
DCA Hillman, PhD
Thomas Dunne Books
So, this genius is trying to claim that not only did the ancient Greeks and Romans know about things like "weed" and "drugs," but that they actually used them a lot and sometimes even took them on purpose just to get really wasted. Suuuure guy. Next you'll be telling us there were such things as ancient prostitutes and the Greeks were into fucking little boys and the Romans built separate barfing facilities outside the dining halls where they held their orgies. Right. Maybe there are still a couple dodecagenarians at Cambridge clinging to the notion that the classical age was all noble heroics and sobriety, but for the rest of us a this could have been called The No Doye Guide to Greco-Roman Pharmacology.
KELLY BUNSTON