“I didn’t particularly understand what I had to offer as a confidant to anybody, much less straight women with endless romantic problems and a passion for trying on Capri pants.

As I moved away from home, to bigger and bigger cities, I discovered that there were lots of scruffy and poorly dressed drone-rock-loving gay men in the world — especially of my age group — who had nothing in common with the Sanfords and Wills I’d seen on TV. Just because I was into dudes didn’t mean I had to suddenly love dance music or fine furnishings. And yet, despite my continued shortcomings as a stereotypical gay man, I remained a strangely alluring target for a large number of straight women.”

-Thomas Rogers, Salon.com

A good 96 percent of the Penney’s inventory is made of polyester. The few clothing items that are made of cotton make a sincere point of being cotton and tell you earnestly about their 100-percent cottonness with faux-hand-scribbled labels so obviously on the Green bandwagon they practically spit pine cones.

You meet a lot of Tony Hoagland’s friends in Tony Hoagland’s poems.[3] What Narcissism Means to Me names more names than you can shake a stick at—there’s Alex and Greg and Boz and Rus, Susan and Margaret, Kath and Peter and Mary, Neal and Sylvia and Ann and Ethan, Carla and Jerry and Peter, and these just in the first half-dozen poems (it would be easier if they were all named George, like George Foreman’s sons). Frank O’Hara used to give his friends walk-on roles, and many a young poet now stuffs his acknowledgments with what seems to be his entire address book. Hoagland’s friends merely slouch around the house making smart remarks, which their Boswell dutifully records.

Alex said, I wish they made a shooting gallery
using people like that.

Greg said, That woman has a Ph.D. in Face.
Then we saw a preview for a movie

about a movie star who is having a movie made about her,
and Boz said, This country is getting stupider each year.

Then Greg said that things were better in the sixties
and Rus said that Harold Bloom said
that Nietzsche said Nostalgia
is the blank check issued to a weak mind,
and Greg said …

But enough! This is all very agreeable, as far as it goes, and makes the implicit criticism that Americans have become couch potatoes who get their Nietzsche second- or third-hand. Yet when poem succeeds poem of these nattering chums, you realize how little you care about them—if the poet stopped hanging out with them, he might have something more interesting to write about. They come and go with all the anonymity of Eliot’s women talking of Michelangelo —except, four generations later, they’re no longer talking of Michelangelo.

Clancy did not like the place.  He felt that Mr. Rowantree was wasting his time.  It troubled him to think of the energy in a man’s day being spent in this place.  A narrow trail, past tables and desks, urns and statues, led into the store and then branched off in several directions.  Clancy had never seen so much junk.  Since he couldn’t imagine it all being manufactured in any one country, he guessed that it had been brought there from the four corners of the world.  It seemed to Clancy a misuse of time to have gathered all these things into a dark store on Third Avenue.  But it was more than the confusion and the waste that troubled him; it was the feeling that he was surrounded by the symbols of frustration and that all the china youths and maidens in their attutudes of love were the company of bitterness.  It may have been because he had spent his happy life in bare rooms that he associated goodness with ugliness.

“Clancy in the Tower of Babel” -John Cheever

In her unapologetically subjective readings of literature and culture, Nehring goes in for a certain amount of melodrama and overstatement — “I embrace generalization,” as she puts it — but in many ways this is the appeal, the freshness of the book. “A Vindication of Love” takes itself more seriously than does its distant cousin, Laura Kipnis’s clever but coy manifesto “Against Love.” Nehring is writing in a previous mold, in the lost tradition of the Simone de Beauvoirs and Mary Wollstonecrafts that existed before the clotted irony, the obligatory, cool self-mockery, the endlessly indulgent self-deflation so popular today. Katie Riophe, Adj. Prof. of Literature at NYU, NYTimes Book Review

ton·so·ri·al (tn-sôr-l, -sr-) adj. Of or relating to barbering or a barber.

[From Latin tnsrius, from tnsor, barber, from tnsus, past participle of tondre, to shear; see tem- in Indo-European roots.]