Today in half-decent publicity gimmickry: “International hotel chain Holiday Inn is offering a trial human bed-warming service at three hotels in Britain this month. If requested, a willing staff-member at two of the chain’s London hotels and one in the northern English city of Manchester will dress in an all-in-one fleece sleeper suit before slipping between the sheets.” There are any number of ways to go with this one, but I’m just gonna leave it up there and let you work your collective magic on it. I could kind of go for a nap right now.

There was a benefit concert at the Knitting Factory in Brooklyn last night to raise money to help A Tribe Called Quest MC Phife Dawg, who has diabetes, pay his medical bills. At the end of the show, Phife’s old partners Q-Tip and Ali Shaheed Muhammad joined him onstage to perform a string of songs from 1993’s Midnight Marauders album. Here’s “Oh My God”-during which Q-Tip mimes the act of giving Phife dialysis-and “Award Tour.” Pretty joyous.

The Unofficial, Unpublished Introduction To An Unfinished Memoir That You Totally Knew Existed, Discovered by Liz Colville

by Liz Colville

“Committed is an unfurling of [Elizabeth] Gilbert’s profound anxiety about reëntering a legally binding arrangement that she does not really believe in. All this ambivalence, expressed in her high-drama prose, can be a lot to handle. (One generally doesn’t indulge another person’s emotional processing at this length unless the jabbering is likely to conclude with sex.)” -Ariel Levy, The New Yorker

, Jan. 11, 2010.

Here I am again, alone in the world, like a newborn baby coated in an amniotic layer of guilt. When I started writing this book, I thought it was going to be about the children that I was finally-finally!-going to have with my second husband, to whom this book is dedicated even though we’re no longer together. That’s right, I’m a divorcée again. I am the person that, deep within myself, hidden in the bottom-most, darkest, dustiest corner of my heart, I never wished to become, and yet became-twice. Despite all my best efforts to avoid the fate I seem to have been given due to some kind of unpleasant birthright-I am American, after all, and we do get divorced an awful lot-I have become the person you, if you have at least one cynical bone in your body, may have imagined I would become while reading unfavorable reviews of my last book.

As I sit here writing this, my editor still thinks that I’m writing about babies. She is blissfully unaware of my life, since my now ex-husband and I decided to steal away to Argentina soon after he was granted the U.S. resident status that only our matrimony could procure. She sits in her ivory-colored corner office in Manhattan while I slough off every layer of my dignity through sweat in a house surrounded by tall trees whose names I still can’t pronounce, eaten away by exotic but harmless insects who seem to be extracting the very essence of my happiness as they prod their way into my pores.

I am alone, though my soon-to-be ex-husband is just in the next room playing Wii. He, too, is alone. I’m not so consumed by my own unhappiness that I can’t imagine what his unhappiness must be like. But as I watch him amble around in front of the television like a mime having a seizure, I can’t help but wonder if he understands my unhappiness. I begin to ask myself whether he is truly unhappy or just suspended in some kind of safe bubble, floating around in air so noxious with my unhappiness that he wouldn’t be able to breathe, so he enclosed himself in this somber state to carry out his days until I get on my plane back to America, never to return, unless I decide that for the fourth installment of my memoir, I’m going to fly down here to win him back.

I didn’t plan on writing this book, or the previous one, for that matter. Or the one before that. But this story must be told. It is a story of how a woman entered into a legally binding contract with someone she met worlds away, only because she desired to live with him in the U.S. Her home. Not his home. He made the sacrifice to flee his homeland for me. To come to America because I was afraid that if I did not live in it, America would, like that medicine man who at first didn’t recognize me when I returned to see him in India or wherever it was, cease to recognize me, cease to know of my relevance in their lives, cease to see hordes of their fellow man clutching one of my books on a crowded subway train-holding it close to them like a small, beloved dog. Coming back to America with my now ex-husband really felt like the moment the medicine man did finally recognize me: surviving driving your car off a bridge into a lake. Coming back to America after that quixotic and (at least financially) successful quest for myself was all that.

The irony is that, back in the bustling capital of the world, the pulsating nucleus of the publishing industry, a place with yoga on every corner where I felt I was my most alive self, I actually saw that I was-imperceptibly to everyone but me-driving myself off a bridge. I was trying to enjoy a new life with my second husband while secretly plotting how I might subject our lives to something book-length. Meanwhile, I was inside a doomed car of my own making, foot pressing on the gas so gently yet unmistakably, as if my demise was an innocent creature that had to be slowly coaxed into my life or else it would grow afraid and run away, and we’d have to start all over again. But in reality, the bridge was closer than I thought. The only way to avoid my fate was to turn the car around and drive home, then drive past the house, go to the airport, and get on a plane to somewhere I’d never been. I asked my husband to come with me, not realizing that he was the reason I wanted to jump off a bridge, figuratively speaking, in the first place.

Or at least, I thought he was. But it’s never that simple.

It started with a notion that I had nothing to write about. I’d heard married writers tell me this, that once they got hitched they returned to their desks and found that matrimony was like the sound of crickets rubbing their legs together in the trees outside my house here in Argentina. Not that clichéd idea of crickets-as-vapidity-tumbleweed blowing in the wind-but crickets as deafening monotone, crushing imagination with their every knee-knock. But what was actually causing the sound? Was it the writers rubbing their legs together, obsessing over each other, their marriage, as if it were a career or a child? Or was it something more complex-the writer rubbing up against the fear that her best years were behind her, that marriage was closing the lid on the Pandora’s box that could be her life, and seemed, from this vantage point, to have been her life up until the exchange of vows (Pandora’s box transformed into a coffin)? Or was it the writer rubbing up against the sound of Jonathan Franzen ridiculing his under-published ex-wife at a dinner table full of publishing giants? Or was it just the sound that the Internet made when it traveled to the writer’s head, distracting her for hours and hours, yet so beloved to her that she would rather blame her spouse on her downfall than it?

Such questions consumed me for weeks, or 373 book pages. I was driving myself closer to the guardrail of the bridge with every sentence I wrote, not realizing that I was also getting closer and closer to publishable victory. When my husband was at work I wandered the house reading The Four Agreements, trying to make at least two agreements with myself. Right before my husband came home I’d lock myself in my office and pretend I’d been there all day and was so engrossed in what I was working on that I couldn’t be disturbed. This had an interesting effect, because I actually would become engrossed, and would only feel that I was finished with my work as soon as I heard my husband express his first snore of the night.

This is how we lived. Meanwhile, friends would always say I was “glowing.” The truth was that the heat in Argentina coupled with their anticipation of us having a child was so scorching that my face may have appeared red. It certainly wasn’t from makeup, because I stopped wearing any after 9/11. And it wasn’t from yoga, because I found that after I got married, I became yogically paralyzed. When I felt I needed to exercise I would take the subway to a 24-hour gym after my husband had gone to bed and ride the elliptical machine while reading a copy of Vogue from 2004, the only magazine the gym had. I would be so tired when I returned, so dazed and yet buzzed in my four-a.m. body, that I would read in an armchair, thinking I could just stay up until morning, then sleep until long after my husband had left for work. I’d fall asleep around 5, but I’m a very light sleeper, so I always woke up when he did. He would walk by me in the morning and smile-I’d open one eye just a sliver to read his face, pretending to be asleep-and I would start the day with the delicious idea that we were very happy and I was just a very ambitious author doing what she needed to do to get into the next book and then get out of it!

Remember in one of my other books when I talk about sitting at a table with a kitchen knife, no food or cutting board in sight, if you catch my drift? Well, that happened again, only this time I was trying to kill myself with exercise, sleep deprivation and the endless-scroll function on Tumblr, or anything else Internet-based that could get me through the daylight hours and into the night, when I’d start writing. Sometimes I’d spend hours organizing my inbox and changing the “Fetch Mail” setting back and forth between “Once a minute” to “Once a day,” each decision naturally driven by opposing philosophies. But when I’d set it to “Once a day,” I would just end up going to the application once a minute and clicking the “Get Mail” button. One time I did this and an e-mail came through with the subject: PLEASE TO YOUR ATTENTION MADAM. It was from a deposed emperor of Argentina, and he was offering me the sum of $11 million. I knew a scam when I saw one (hello, ashram!), but the e-mail sparked something so thrilling in my head, it was like how a junkie must feel when he waits weeks to get that next hit and finally, after weeks of agony and misery and mystery and saving up lots of money and wondering if he’s going to even make it to that next moment of ecstasy, that delightful moment of opiate-infused nirvana, thinking that his life is either completely over or may be about to really, really start for the first time in his life, he gets it.

I got it.

So we moved to Argentina to live like deposed emperors, surrounded by fine things because I was determined to drain my net worth as motivation to keep writing and publishing new work. I was secure in the 16-book contract I had with my publisher, but I was not secure in the ideas that would lead me to fulfill the contract. I had not yet realized that anything I wrote would be published. That if I was walking with a pen and tripped and fell and in breaking my fall, ended up scrawling something on the floor, it would be optioned by a Hollywood director. I thought that a change of scenery would help me relax, see my husband in a new light, re-prioritize my life and help me get back to being a yogi and a better person. The reality is that I locked myself in a new office while my husband conducted training seminars for his company via the Internet from our new kitchen, his co-workers and superiors becoming increasingly annoyed that he insisted on working remotely from another hemisphere so that he try to match the rate at which my royalties were being deposited into my bank account.

It wasn’t that I had come to resent my husband or anything like that. It was that I had come to resent myself, or rather, the parts of myself that could not fit onto the pages of a book. It was a long, arduous process that had started in my old office in New York and ended in my new one, here, today, as I write this introduction to a book so dear to me it’s as if it’s my child, like my real, actual child, not an adopted child, which my previous books seem to me now. At some point the stack of paper that this book has become was just a thin pile, like a handful of utility bills, and I would stare at it in misery, pulled down to the depths of my sadness by the hands of some menacing cluster of brain cells determined to torture me. Then I would catch a bit of myself in the reflection of my laptop screen and let out a sound that was something between a scoff and a groan. It wasn’t because all I could see was my nose, my least favorite feature. But it may have been because I had condensed my entire worth into the shape and size of my nose and the sentiment I felt towards it.

When I looked in the actual mirror I would sigh deeply as if into a breathalyzer and try to imagine Julia Roberts. In those first days in Argentina, I could see her in the vague shape of my smile, if I could force one upon my face. But soon my brain had no capacity for such glimmers of pleasant delusion, and I began subjecting not only the four sad walls of my office to my fitful state, but also my Tumblr followers and my husband.

He walked out on me after watching me squeeze a mango still in its skin with one fist, the pulp and juice splattering slowly onto the kitchen floor between where we stood. Of course, he ended up coming back, and we will live together for several more weeks as we finalize our schism. But the sound of the front door closing behind him after the mango incident seemed to me the sound of a gun going off, and after washing the remnants of the mango carcass off my hands, I sat down to write this introduction, glancing over at that wonderful pile that I recognized for the first time as an entire publishable book that you are about to read. First I stopped by the bathroom with my laptop to give myself a smile in that beautiful mirror surrounded by light bulbs. Finally! I didn’t see an actress playing me on the big screen at all. I saw me: me as a child, me as a teenager, me. Free. Not resurrected yet, but bound to come back to life soon. Then I turned the bathroom light off, climbed into the bathtub with my computer, drew the shower curtain across, and took pictures of myself with my laptop’s built-in camera, eager to capture footage of this ghost before she disappeared forever.

Liz Colville loves a memoir.

Men: Do you wish to attire yourself in the splendiferous fashion of New York Post gossip king Neel Shah? Of course you do! Neel “always looks totally comfortable, like he just got off a mountain at Stowe or an East End beach,” and who couldn’t use a little more of that in his life? Here’s a handy guide!

“The pro-life movement is pro-women, and it empowers women with the message that we are strong enough and smart enough to be able to pursue education, vocations and avocations while giving life to a child.”
-When Sarah Palin puts it that way, it makes me think maybe I’ve been completely wrong on the whole abortion issue. Oh, wait, no it doesn’t, because that’s not what it’s about at all.

“Massholes are not just an economically and educationally diverse bunch. They’re also more ethnically varied than Guidos: There are Jews, Irishmen, WASPs, Italians, and Portuguese who will happily cut you off on the Bourne Bridge and then give you the finger.” Awl pal Jess Grose suggests the next tribal culture the ethnographers at MTV should chronicle.

“I call it a weapon because it guarantees winning the war. When someone parks in front of your house and continues to do so to annoy you, then the easiest way to get your message across is to discharge your sewage in front of his house for three days. However, this also creates problems between other residents in the same area and can lead to counterattacks.”
-Abdu, a Saudi man living in the southern Jeddah district of Ghulail, explains the new tactics in a conflict wherein residents block the entryways to the homes of neighbors with raw sewage, “often to devastating effect.”

by Michael Brendan Dougherty

Dear Conservative Movement,

That was crazy in Massachusetts! Right? I mean, it was like two months ago that liberals were all up in our faces. They said, “NY-23! We beat that Doug Hoffman, teabaggers!” Yeah. They beat a third-party candidate. And then Ted Kennedy’s still-warm seat was just handed to us. They can console themselves with a congressional district, while we strangle the most important liberal reform since the Johnson administration.

So, yeah. We’re supposed to be happy. I know we’re all talking about the glory days of 1994, or 1984. I’m sure there is some mid-level staffer at National Review, trying to conjure the tears of Barry Goldwater on behalf of Scott Brown. But in case you’ve forgotten, even by your own standards, you’re kind of in terrible shape.

First, you’re obsessed with yourself. You try everything in the culture-The Incredibles, Wal-Mart, Crocs-and you ask: Is it conservative? This makes us look like creep socialists from the 1930s, debating endlessly about whether something is sufficiently proletariat. Weren’t we supposed to defend truth, beauty, and goodness (like St. Thomas Aquinas?) You ask us to measure Bill Watterson, Bill Cosby and Bill Clinton by one measure: conservative/not conservative.

You go so far as to encourage people to fabricate their entire identity from the Republican platform. Look at S.E. Cupp. She used to be a person! Now, under your influence, she is one of the lamer Rush Limbaugh monologues from the Clinton era. She’s a copy of a copy of Xerox of a rejected P.J. O’Rourke riff. How can you live with yourself, conservative movement?

You may not know this. But all the smartest people on the Right are basically ashamed to be associated with you. Your “success” in building a set of near-permanent institutions, think-tanks, and magazines to promote your ideals in an uncontaminated environment leaves us with two choices:

1) Sell out to the movement. That is, we may occupy ourselves by explaining that whatever the GOP is promoting-whether it be torture, pre-emptive war, Mutually Assured Destruction, or supply-side economics-is an enduring Western value. If John Boehner is doing it, we’re supposed to figure out why Edmund Burke would support it.

Or:

2) Sell out the movement. That is, pitch our articles to liberal audiences. Trash the movement (like I’m doing), and trade our actual conservative convictions for the ephemeral respect of our peers.

If one of us tries to walk a fine line between these two, we’ll be accused of either disloyalty by the hacks or of hackery by the principled and aloof. One way merits a secure gig in the movement’s intellectual ghetto. The other may win a few of us a higher status but a more insecure job at a respected outlet.

This situation makes actual arguments difficult, since everyone assumes we are simply enacting long-term branding strategies, rather than stating our views honestly. You’ve made it impossible for us to have a conversation.

Because you’ve made yourself a prostitute for the GOP, a cynical and corrupt organization since Reconstruction, all of your young geniuses are tainted. People don’t respect their ideas, because they can’t assume they are genuinely held, rather than cynical ploys to keep Joe Palinsupporter in line.

And so, young conservatives hate themselves. They live in fear that if they do state their actual views, they’ll be forbidden from any meaningful work in the future outside the movement.

The reason Ross Douthat won’t share his views on gay marriage in detail is simple. He knows gay marriage opponents will be portrayed as the Bull Connors of the near-future. And he wants to keep writing film criticism and noodling theology for educated readers.

How many times did William F. Buckley have his tepid, once-moderate sounding defense of segregation quoted to him? A million times. By liberals, and paleo-conservative racists both. But Buckley was indestructible. Douthat and the rest of us aren’t. We know that for the foreseeable future, liberals have the whip-hand in forming the “prevailing structure of taboos.”

Which brings me to the last point. You’re a failure, and your ambitions are so limited, it makes me cold.

The prelapsarian conservatives of the 30s opposed foreign adventurism and naive Wilsonian internationalism. They wanted to shrink the size of the federal government. In over 70 years, despite massive public spasms of disgust with the federal government, conservatives have only made it larger and stupider.

Let’s list how! Eisenhower’s Cold War mobilization, Nixon’s wage and price controls and the EPA, Reagan’s massive expansion of military spending, financed by tax cuts that were sold to the public as “revenue generating.” The process culminated in the hilariously fascist sounding, grant-writing chop shop known as the Department of Homeland Security. So: failure.

Don’t get me started on foreign policy. There we were always at odds. I was a kind of isolationist. Your two unwinnable wars did little to dissuade me on that point.

But then this free market stuff. Live within your means. Fend for yourself. Be responsible. I believed that. But the people you elected didn’t. Bankers, GE, Archers Daniels Midland, military contractors, really all sorts of speculators-they deserved wealth transfers, cheap credit, debt cancellation. These are your welfare queens, conservative movement. Do you know how bad this makes us look, after having attacked poor people and minorities as free-riders?

Anyway, perhaps most grandly, you’ve tried to preserve Christian civilization, in decline since the 60s, or the 20s, or the French Revolution, or since William of Ockham, if you ask Richard Weaver.

Though a minority of us still read and adhere to some hearty theology, Dutch Calvinism, Tractarianism or Latin-Mass Catholicism, you’ve abandoned your charges and America to Jesus-is-my-Boyfriend style mega-churches. If the choice is between listening to the wisdom of Kirk Cameron and singing Jars of Clay songs and pledging our virginity versus going to college, reading Kant and fornicating? I can tell you, categorically, we’ll be going at it like heathens and Democrats.

But perversely, you seem to thrive on this sort of failure. You’ve always accused liberals of creating social ills with government programs, immediately followed by proposing government programs for said social ills. The same is true of you. The more anxiety we have about family breakdown, the more we donate to the Heritage Foundation. Because the cure for deracinated social atomism is obviously a white paper.

The only thing you’re really good at is preserving the conservative movement. And that project bored me to tears.

I will admit it. There was something I found seductive about you. If someone wants to shout “Abortion is disgusting” (it is) or “Taxes suck” (they do) or “Let’s defend America First!” (always), they can find a place to do it in the conservative movement. If they are presentable enough to date women, within two years or so, they’ll be writing for conservative magazines, appearing on conservative podcasts, maybe even hanging out with elected officials.

It begins with one unshakable intellectual conviction in college, like “Entrepreneurs are awesome!” (a little Randian for me), or “modernity is chaos”-and suddenly someone is a part of a movement staffed with other bright, young, idealistic conservatives who think, drink and talk like they do. Privately, they even complain about you, like I do.

But it doesn’t take long for the nausea to set in. You start teaching us to embrace an inferiority complex, one that makes us feel like rebels, while making us more dependent your largesse.

You’ve tried to sweet-talk me-to convince me that a Kenyan socialist is sleeping in the same bedroom once occupied by Saint Ronnie, the divorced patron saint of union-busting.

But, we’re done. I tried to “improve you,” from my associate editor perch at a dissenting conservative magazine. Now? I wish you would go away. You’re an obstacle, taking every civic impulse of your audience and turning it into rotten populism. You turn every bit of goodwill and honest anxiety into a sleazy direct-mail fundraiser.

Some of us want to actually conserve what is good about this country. Some of us want to write fiction that has nothing to do with “conservatism,” as you call it. Some of us just can’t swallow our embarrassment anymore.

Regards,

Michael

P.S. Scott Brown is what you used to call a “squish.” So, you’re settling too.

Michael Brendan Dougherty is (still) a contributing editor to The American Conservative. As of this writing S.E. Cupp was one of his Facebook friends.

If you were writing a script for a movie, or perhaps an episode of “The Sopranos,” and you needed a name for a retired warrant officer who bought a South Jersey bowling alley called Pike Lanes Family Fun Center, talked big about putting the competition out of business, and then burned down a beloved local landmark in order to do so, what’s the best you could come up with? How about Steven Henry Smink? Yes, Smink. That’s the name of the 47-year-old man accused of arson in the fire that gutted the 50-year-old Loyle Lanes bowling alley in Vineland in the early morning hours of January 11th.

Apparently, the 45-year-old Family Fun Center, in Deerfield, which Smink bought in 2007, had fallen upon hard times. It lost its liquor license in July. Lanes had been closed in need of repair, leagues-regular customers-were finding other venues. Like the well-established Loyle Lanes-a four million dollar business that had just received $400,000 worth of renovation, including ten-foot video screens and new computerized scoring system. Smink, who has a prior conviction on a federal weapons charge and would no doubt be played by Steve Buscemi in your movie, owed $28,000 in back taxes. So, police say, he hired as accomplices 21-year-old electrician Felix Manzano and an unnamed 17-year-old-both of whom live near Smink in Northeast Philadelphia-and bought a can of gasoline, which was found in the woods behind the shell of Loyle Lanes after the fire.

The three were arrested on Tuesday after a surveillance operation outside their homes. Pike Lanes closed for business later that day. When a Gannet News reporter contacted Manzano’s father, the man said he didn’t believe his son was guilty. “He’s stupid,” the elder Manzano said. “But he’s not that stupid.”

Proving that, for crime reporters, at least, it really is always sunny in Philadelphia.