It is with deep regret that I now find myself in ownership of this book. Can we call it a book? This essay collection from perhaps the most pretentious magazine ever put to print? Whatever it is, I must now responsibly find it a new home or start a controlled fire.

There was a total of maybe five essays in this bundle of deconstructed tree fibers that I quite enjoyed and, you know, that's worth acknowledging. Lillian Ross could have just included her own pieces, deleted all the rest, and then saved all of those tree fibers. For the sake of posterity, here are the good ones (it strains me to think that the best essays came out of the 80s, for godsakes):


- James Thurber's "The Frescoer" about Diego Rivera painting in an empty building

- John Updike's assessment of "Faces" in New York (aka "Ode to Peoplewatching")

- Maeve Brennan's "Long-Winded Lady" (the second one? for some reason this individual has received an excessive amount of coverage in the New Yorker), in which rich people sit around in a bar looking at other rich people and feeling the self-satisfying ennui of being rich in a bar. Very New York

- John Updike taking unconventional routes through the city in "Rockefeller Center Ho!"

- Garrison Keillor's "Almanac," which lists facts that are pointless and reminds me of the complete absurdity of all knowledge and life itself

- Lola Finkelstein and Lillian Ross' "Elsewhere," which is about shopping in other countries and being diFFeREnT

- Lillian Ross' "Fancy," my all-time fav, in which she walks around a Fancy Food and Collection Show and meets all kinds of strange people and tastes strange things and everything is "delish"

- Ann Beattie's "Handbag" about a person who keeps everything she could possibly need in her bag, very satisfying

- Ian Frazier writing about "Monster Trucks and Mud Bog" competitions, which are so characteristically hillbilly it hurts

- Mark Singer's "Adoption," in which he goes with a group of sixth-graders to adopt a Hudson River Bass, it's good fun as we all know

- John McPhee's "In Virgin Forest," which gave off very good vibes of The Overstory

- William Finnegan's "Taste of Texas," which makes prominent use of the word "bodacious"

- Adam Gopnik's "Palace," which talks about losing something precious and old, which I do think we can all relate to a bit right now

- Garrison Keillor's "Flowering," which was a sensitive and beautifully written account of a man attending a flower show and then feeling things

- Lillian Ross' "The Shit-Kickers of Madison Avenue," for perfectly capturing the way teenagers did and frankly still do talk

- William Finnegan's "After Midnight," about illegal bungee-jumping in NYC


Well, maybe it was more than five.