The Morning Before, or, Take Back the Afternoon

Going back to work tomorrow fills me with that kind of sleepy anxiety, in part because I feel as if each month is like trying to fill a giant pond by sitting on the shore and spitting into it. Ptooey! But also I actually like my bizarre job! I also would like to crawl into a dark cave for a million years. Anyway, I have been doing something called “reading” during the mornings on my few days off this last week. And speaking of reading, my biggest hope regarding going back to work tomorrow is that everyone will have finished having an opinion regarding Katie Roiphe by midnight tonight so that I do not have to thoroughly read her latest piece. You can understand why I presume it consists of just more of her insane and systematically incorrect ramblings. (I was living in New York City and working already while she was getting her doctorate at Princeton and publishing her first book about all those menacing ideas that confronted her there and at Harvard, and so, as a reading person, was subject regularly to her published half-thoughts, though I was also present to have enjoyed her mother’s weekly columns in the Observer.) I do not understand why a person who has been as wrong as she has been is currently employed.

For instance, in the introduction to her piece in the NYTBR, the editors note that:

Roiphe also noted that the muted sex scenes in the work of the young novelists she discusses [these are Eggers, Kunkel (who has published one book, five years ago, and, last I heard, intends to never write another, finding the experience objectionable) Wallace (dead), Chabon (46), and then Foer and Franzen in passing] form an interesting contrast to that of younger women writers and gay writers, too.

Of course, the piece itself does not touch on this idea, nor is this an area of coverage in which the NYTBR is particularly interested, but in this introduction, she cites as these “younger women writers and gay writers, too” just these: Mary Gaitskill, 55. Susan Minot, who is, I believe, 53. And, good grief, Alan Hollinghurst, also 55. What is one supposed to even make of this pile-up of non-ideas?