Goodbye Now, Rum Friends, and Best Wishes - John Jeremiah Sullivan

Brilliant piece of writing
You must read this even if it is simply to remind yourself
that you are nowhere near as smart as a few really smart people in the world

da-sein

“You got a good mag (like the pulp-heads say) …” Norman Mailer

This is from Norman Mailer’s letter of resignation to Esquire in 1960. It also serves as the epigraph to “Pulphead,” the recently released book of essays by John Jeremiah Sullivan, a New York Times Magazine contributing writer who last wrote for us about experiencing Disney World under the influence of weapons-grade marijuana. The response so far to “Pulphead” has been about as great as a writer can hope for — and couldn’t be, in my opinion, more completely deserved. Various reviewers have called it the most impressive collection of nonfiction since David Foster Wallace’s “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again,” and continuing the Wallace theme, there’s this, from Zach Baron’s review in The Daily:


¶To be a writer is to obsess about other writers. Mostly it is to obsess about other, better writers. “Infinite Jest” is an exceptionally good novel. But David Foster Wallace so haunts the modern literary imagination, not because of “Infinite Jest” or the unfinished and uneven “The Pale King” or any of his other books. Wallace is the object of a generation’s adoration on account of his unavoidably evident talent, which so patently surpassed that of his peers that, in a sense, it was immaterial what he did with it. Other writers knew they were not as talented as he — even the ones who wrote better books — and they stayed up nights because of it. Jonathan Franzen wrote “The Corrections” just to feel better about himself after reading “Infinite Jest” in manuscript. Smart writers always know who is smarter, even — especially — when they’d prefer not to.

Which is a long-winded way of saying that John Jeremiah Sullivan, the Kentucky-born, 37-year-old contributor to GQ, The New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, Harper’s and other publications, is that writer at the moment. The better one. The one making it hard on everyone else.

If you’re in the mood to read about Axl Rose or about life after “The Real World” or about Michael Jackson in a way that no one else has written about him or a transformative Christian rock festival or the experience of living in the One Tree Hill house (please watch the accompanying video) … then this is the collection for you. Congratulations to John on a wonderful book.