by Mark Bibbins, Editor

I Grade Online Humanities Tests

at McDonalds where there are no black people
and there’s a multiple choice question
or white people about Don Quixote
or Asian or Indian people I don’t want to be around
people I want to be here where there is
free wireless I do not want to sit at the Christian
coffee shop nor the public
library No I want religion to blow itself up
My sister converted to Catholicism
I do not want to sit at Starbucks
I like McDonalds coffee because it is cheap
and watery I like how it tastes
I like this table where the old man
is telling his old friend
about the baby black swan that he would feed
corn to in Cairo, Georgia when he was a kid
No, Mark Twain did not write Don Quixote I’m going to
be here a while in this fucked up shit
You can get an old Crown Vic police car
In Cairo for $500 so I read
a poem by James Franco in the literary magazine I brought with
My mechanic wants to fuck me
And the poem isn’t as bad
as people say he is bad One of his friends dies
in the poem He says the word “cunt” I don’t know
what to make of it I read it as “Cnut,”
the medieval prince of Denmark who ascended and ascended
to become the king of England I bet some managers here could relate
to Cnut Send me a pic of your
cunt the mechanic says I miss you I say what do
you miss about me He says “your big tits”
Elliott Smith is mentioned in
the Franco poem and might or might not
be a “cowboy” Maybe Franco really
is bad after all The Crown Vic is
a vehicle the way the police always
say “vehicle” not “car” but the mechanic
always says “car” not “vehicle” because I teach
the police I know how they talk The mechanic
says Sandra, stop speeding and do you want
to see a picture of my wife No, Cervantes
did not write “Because I Could Not
Stop for Death” and I will be
sitting here all day in this fucked up shit god
dammit click click click I keep looking
at things like pictures of your husband
which makes me feel sick
and watery Now a young boy, maybe 8 or 10
in a booth across from me
is telling his mamma his daddy’s new girlfriend is ugly
“She’s ugly, mamma” and trying to comfort her
Do you want to meet in the Home Depot
parking lot? I don’t think this is a good
If I find you with him I’ll kill him
and I’ll kill you and no one will
know where your body But your husband
isn’t ugly he is beautiful leaning over to look at himself
in pond water or leaning over
masculinity itself leaning over the family
he has made for himself and the pond
is male because he owns the pond
and the guns are male because he owns the guns
and what’s happening is male because he owns the factors
that go into the car is male because he owns the police
and Home Depot is male because he owns and owns
and owns and all he can do is own
everything that will rot
like privacy or speech or porn or black swans
or my big tits which he misses
Fucking swans! A man decides to sit
next to me and he is frantically hitting
his egg McMuffin on the table and then walks
outside and smokes a cigarette and returns
to his seat and starts hitting
his wrapped egg McMuffin again
and then he sees my computer and asks
to check his Facebook So I let him
and then he wants to be friends on Facebook
and leaves his phone number on my page
and I “like” it and then in the background
the little boy’s like “She’s ugly, mommy
She’s so ugly mommy” and the mom
is like “Is she? Is she ugly?” And I think the mom
is ugly even though I don’t want her to be
and the other kids at the booth
are drinking milk and they are chubby
and eating fries and saying
“Yeah she’s ugly
Yeah mommy she’s so ugly
You wouldn’t want to meet her
because she’s so ugly”

Sandra Simonds is the author of four books of poetry: Warsaw Bikini (Bloof Books, 2009), Mother Was a Tragic Girl (Cleveland State University, 2012), House of Ions (Bloof Books, 2014) and The Glass Box (Saturnalia, 2015).

You will find more poems here. You may contact the editor at poems@theawl.com.

“The average neighborhood precinct issued 252 speeding summonses in 2012. During the same year, the average NYPD precinct issued 1,069 summonses for ‘excessive window tint,’ for a citywide total of 95,866 summonses for overly tinted windows.”

“Germans Wary of New Huffington Post”

by Rumaan Alam

I recently finished a gig which entailed looking at and writing about the well-appointed homes of various New Yorkers, which made me eager to do something to make my own home more well-appointed. We have glass front bookcases in the dining room, which doubles as playroom for my two kids, and is also where I work. The bookcases are crammed with books and trinkets, and toys are everywhere; it’s a riot of visual stimuli.

I decided to buy some fabric to pin under the glass. I went to eBay, where I was drowning in options: an insane modern toile by Alizée Freudenthal, a graphic Greek key, a bright animal print, and so on. They were all nice. But which one did I like best? How would I know?

Not long ago, I interviewed a well-known author about her career. I read her entire oeuvre — five novels and two story collections. I decided to base my interview prep solely on the books; reviews and interviews were ignored.

The paperback editions of the novels open with pages of accolades, italicized sentences excerpted from various reviews. This is the publisher’s antiquated pitch to the casual bookstore browser, if such a thing even exists anymore. “Ah,” you’re meant to say, “the Christian Science Monitor liked this novel, so it must be good!” I skipped those.

I didn’t read the synopses on Amazon, didn’t visit Wikipedia, didn’t read the jacket copy or blurbs, and didn’t read the press release that accompanied the galley of her to-be-released novel. I wanted to weigh the books’ merits on my own, so much so that I didn’t even look at the colophon. (I still don’t know who her publishers are.) I just read the book and then had to decide: Did I like it? I was not sure.

Is deciding what you like an instinct, a sense that arrives as swiftly as my autoimmune response to cat dander? Or is it the result of reasoned consideration, the way wine tasters swish pinot noir around in their mouths, spit it out, and reach for complex metaphors about chocolate and tobacco? Do you even really decide what you like, or does that fall to Janet Maslin? Or to the waitress who praises the pan-roasted chicken so rapturously? Or to that stranger on Twitter, whose avatar, for some reason, is an egg?

On Twitter you’re not that likely to follow people with whom you disagree anymore than you’d engage deeply with people with whom you fundamentally disagree in real life. (One study (PDF) found that retweeting of political news takes place in extremely “homogenous communities.”) You might follow Ramesh Ponnuru because it makes you feel conscientious, much as you might shout down your homophobic cousin at Thanksgiving. But for the most part, Twitter is a mutual admiration society.

Everyone on Twitter — everyone on the Internet — seems so damn certain. Brevity doesn’t allow for nuance, and it’s a nice complement to confidence. The best tweeters dismiss Maureen Dowd or praise a particular restaurant in a way that leaves little room for argument.

I try for certainty, too. I said something mean on Twitter about Delia Ephron’s essay about pastry and having it all. But a number of people I follow, many of whom I consider like-minded, said the opposite. They praised her humor, her insight, or sent the link out into the world with “This,” which is probably the most ringing — and lazy! — endorsement you can make on Twitter.

I am not anti-Internet, and I don’t think smart phones are a social ill. I just think most people are boors. Checking your phone during dinner is no less rude than reading People during dinner, which I once saw a woman do at Blue Ribbon Brooklyn as she dined with her husband/boyfriend/whatever. I tweeted about it while my date was in the ladies room.

I still don’t care for Ephron’s essay. At least I think I don’t. Maybe I do? Maybe I like the Internet so much I no longer know what else I like.

Who are professional critics to decide what movie/book/restaurant/dance performance is worth seeing? This familiar plaint is most often offered by someone who’s had work they directed/wrote/cooked/choreographed critically filleted.

That’s part of what we love about the Internet — that civilians, armed with Blogspot and a digital camera can make themselves into powerful critical voices. There’s clout and there’s Klout. You no longer need to be under contract at The New Republic to wield influence. With some confidence to declare your likes and dislikes in a handful of characters, anyone can be Ellsworth Toohey.

Many, myself included, still defer to the professional critic — in my case, perhaps too much. For months, I have excitedly anticipated Norman Rush’s new novel, Subtle Bodies. Michiko Kakutani, as is her wont, dismissed it as “totally annoying.” Ruth Franklin gave the book a more considered but no less severe drubbing. It sucks, but I’m now less excited about Rush’s book. However I finally feel about it, I’ll never know how much my judgement is colored by these critics.

Some take pride in declaring the unheralded or overlooked their favorite — arguing that Alice is their favorite Woody Allen film, say. (Woody Allen rather trollishly claims to love Zelig.) I can see that esoteric taste makes you cool but I have always been conventional. When a critic is hard on something I love — Norman Rush, Tchaikovsky’s first piano concerto, “The Golden Girls” — I question my assumptions and my taste. I worry I don’t know how to like something. I know taste is subjective, I know everyone has her own top ten novels. But I don’t want to know what you think of mine. I don’t want to know if you don’t like Mating. I’m scared I’ll start to question my judgments, my taste. I don’t want to lose them.

I can be opinionated on Twitter, and try to be confident, but my tweets aren’t snap judgments; they’re canned judgments. I can tweet about disliking Andy Borowitz without having to put any thought into the matter. The rest of the time, I’m faking it. I don’t really know how to make judgments; I am just pretending that I do. I might seem exasperated about Junot Diaz, but it would take me a long time and far more than 140 characters to work out how I really feel about his work. I worry that this means my mind is feebler than the modern mind ought to be.

Malcolm Gladwell probably wrote about snap judgments being the right judgment, that you’ve made up your mind after thirty seconds, so you don’t need to stand there pondering that Gerhard Richter for ten minutes. Or maybe he didn’t. Maybe deciding whether you like something or not demands reflection, demands time. I don’t really know what Malcolm Gladwell said about it because I don’t read him; I don’t really like the things Malcolm Gladwell writes about. At least, I think I don’t?

I recently sat with two other editors at a magazine, and reviewed the work of about five-dozen up-and-coming industrial designers. I’m a writer, working for magazines and in advertising, and am often asked to make judgments, quickly, that relate to matters of taste. The meeting was forty minutes long, so we spent seconds discussing each possible product, and we decided right on the spot if the work was correct for the magazine. The junior editor presented the work, the senior editor considered it. Sometimes they would turn to me and say, “What do you think?”

This senior editor was knowledgeable and experienced, surely the key components of taste. If anyone has taste, she does. Yet she wanted to know my opinion, because even someone with finely-honed taste worries, at least a little bit, about being alone in her opinion. Taste may be subjective, but we still want our judgments to be affirmed by others.

Increasingly, everyone seems so confident and clear about their likes and dislikes. Enthusiasms and disdain pile up on one another in my Twitter timeline. People click that little thumbs up on Facebook (responsible, perhaps, for changing the very meaning of “like” to something more like “acknowledge”) whenever they encounter anything — to register that they see it, they like it, they agree, they have taste, they are participating, they feel something, they matter.

I’m overwhelmed. I no longer know what I like. I double-check my list of favorite books, just to be sure they still seem good to me. I’ll hear someone argue that something I thought was terrible is great and I’ll freeze. I’ll worry that I’ve been wrong about every opinion I’ve ever held.

You may think taste is as specific to you as your fingerprints, but it’s more like your preferred method of taking your coffee: there’s a spectrum of proclivities for the latter (just cream, black with two sugars, imbued with the sugary cinnamon that’s marketed as pumpkin), and you fall somewhere on the scale.

You don’t develop taste within a vacuum; it’s molded by your parents and peers, by your class and education, by magazine editors and television executives, by ad people and marketing people, by people exactly like me. When you see those two dozen DESIGNERS TO WATCH, know that I had a hand in yea-ing or nay-ing them and who the hell am I? I’m someone who can’t pick a piece of fabric. I’m someone who isn’t sure if he liked a book or not.

If you have it within you to declare that a book sucks, that a movie is the best, that a television show is a major cultural achievement, I’m in awe. I appreciate your confidence, your perspective, even if you’re just recycling received ideas. I admire that you have convictions. Mean or not, Dale Peck or Christian Lorentzen, I don’t know how critics decide what they think about something week after week.

I should probably stop with Twitter, take a break from the Internet generally. I am surrounded by confidence and all I feel is ambivalence. I am so cowed by how everyone else seems to know their own mind that it’s hard for me to exercise my own. Maybe I’m fatigued. After looking at all those well-appointed homes, I’m not even sure what well-appointed means to me. The cultural conversation leaves me feeling like Whitman listening to the learn’d astronomer drone on and on; I’d like to step outside and look at the stars and remember what I really like. I’m not sure how to do that anymore.

Rumaan Alam lives in New York and for now can be found here: @Rumaan.

“What Would Happen If You Drank Water From The Gowanus Canal?”

I don’t know about you but I am fully at the point of the week where I welcome anything pulling me that much closer to Friday. That is a bill which Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings could easily fill on any day, but it is almost especially welcome on a cold and rainy one like this. Enjoy. [Via]

Oh, man, remember how much you hated the Bush administration, and how you felt like, “Once that is over everything will finally get good again” and then everything stayed shit and somehow actually got worse? Here: This will help you recall the simpler times, when hate was all you needed to give you hope.

You don’t have to have spent time in New Orleans to love The Radiators, but as the years go by and memories of the band recede and their music is played less frequently and only then in their hometown, an association with New Orleans may be your best bet for knowing anything about them. Which is a shame, they were as full of joy as any other act from the Crescent City. On the day head Radiator Ed Volker turns 65, let’s take a listen to what is probably their best known song, which also happens to be one of their prettiest. Happy birthday, Ed Volker.

“The one unguarded thing about Bezos is his laugh — a pulsing, mirthful bray that he leans into while craning his neck back. He unleashes it often, even when nothing is obviously funny to anyone else. And it startles people. ‘You can’t misunderstand it,’ says Rick Dalzell, Amazon’s former chief information officer, who says Bezos often wields his laugh when others fail to meet his lofty standards. ‘It’s disarming and punishing. He’s punishing you.’”

“The City Room column on Oct. 1, about the New York Yankees logo, overstated what is known about the logo’s origins, based on information from the ball club’s Web site. While the logo was designed by Tiffany & Co., the designer is unknown; it was not necessarily Louis Tiffany. The column also misstated Mr. Tiffany’s middle initial. He was Louis C., not Louis B. And the column, using information from the Police Department, erroneously attributed a distinction to John McDowell, a New York City police patrolman who was shot in the line of duty in 1877 and honored with a medallion containing what would later become the Yankees logo. He was not the first officer to be shot in the line of duty; there are documented cases of New York City officers having been shot in the line of duty as early as 1854. (And for the record: a Times article on Jan. 9, 1877, misstated the officer’s surname as McDonnell.)”