Today's reads, 6.1.2009

He Shall be Levi by John Jeremiah Sullivan
"Levi gave me no dirt on the Palins. He is dirt on the Palins. He is what they are pretending to be."

Jesse James Hollywood on Trial by Natasha Vargas-Cooper
"The numb savagery involved in the murder is the kind of stuff that any amateur sociologist could base a thesis on: the suburbs breed their own brand of wanton boys with too much money and too much time, etc."

What I Learned In Creative Writing Class by Anna Holmes
"McGurl's [Mark McGurl] most interesting point — and one he made when I saw him speak last year — is that creative writing programs allow writers whose race or class puts them outside the mainstream to gain positions of cultural authority. Rather than making their writing less authentic (the idea that the "authentic" experience of people of color is a fundamentally uneducated one is, as McGurl points out, insulting and reductive), creative writing programs can make former cultural "outsiders" into authority figures, their work into instructional texts."