Diary of an Unemployed Philosophy Major
July 25th, 2010 at 7:02 pm ETIf you’re not reading “Sam Biddle’s” occasional series “Diary of an Unemployed Class of ‘10 Philosophy Major in New York City” from The Awl, you should be. Gimmicky it is, but after four installments I’m hooked, and the writing is laugh-out-loud sharp at times. Consider this, from part four:
An impossibly tall, grinning, heron-like woman clothed in a matte black trapezoid shimmered in the light of the sloppy sun and waved from behind a barricade. My shirt smelled like ramen seasoning powder in the humid wind. She was standing in front of one of those walls with patterned logos on it that awful people pose before to be photographed at momentous occasions like the launching of a handbag line. I remembered last summer, when L___ told me about his friend’s fundraiser for “nightlife preservation” in New York—is there any way to place something like that in more than one set of quotation marks? I imagine there were a lot of red carpet logo walls there. I thought of this now and closed my eyes and faced the gut-punching sun and thought about how it’s supposed to burn out in a trillion years or whatever, and how maybe that could come a little sooner and it wouldn’t be so bad.
I was laughing out loud at “heron-like,” coughing at “trapezoid,” and steeling myself against diarrhea by the end of that sentence. Imagine fifty paragraphs of this and you start to get the idea. Whoever this guy is, he’s got a writing career ahead of him.
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by Edward Rutherfurd
by Ben Macintyre
