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Today in Gatsby week! Drew Lerman lavishes us with four short comics about Meyer Wolfsheim.Troubled by Fitzgerald’s depiction of Jewishness? Lerman re-doubles your trouble.

Today in Gatsby week! Drew Lerman lavishes us with four short comics about Meyer Wolfsheim.

Troubled by Fitzgerald’s depiction of Jewishness? Lerman re-doubles your trouble.

On the first page, [Nick Carraway] says he is “inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me.” Though this at first sounds laughably insincere, we have seen that he is, if anything, too inclined to not judge, too willing to buy in, too curious in observation to draw limits. The book is surely judgmental, but Nick was too much of a coward to act on his judgments in the moment, shaking Tom’s hand as he does at the end. So that entirely distasteful bit when Nick says, “I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known”—maybe that is honest, too. Nick is compensating for too much softness, steeling himself for a reformation. It is pride, but hasn’t he earned it?

Zach Howe, championing that notoriously unreliable narrator of The Great Gatsby in his “In Defense of Nick Carraway” for Blunderbuss Magazine

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Teamsquad Manatee is ready for action in Ezra Butt’s new comic for Blunderbuss Magazine.

Teamsquad Manatee is ready for action in Ezra Butt’s new comic for Blunderbuss Magazine.

“The two sisters were almost twins, or that’s how they were treated. Their surface traits— same mouse-brown hair, same grey-blue eyes— invited slip-ups and switched names. They loved each other deeply with a kind of impossible love made sometimes of meanness and doubt. The way you distrust your own face instead of the mirror that reflects it.”
-From Valerie Marie Arvidson’s “Sisters” in Blunderbuss Magazine

“The two sisters were almost twins, or that’s how they were treated. Their surface traits— same mouse-brown hair, same grey-blue eyes— invited slip-ups and switched names. They loved each other deeply with a kind of impossible love made sometimes of meanness and doubt. The way you distrust your own face instead of the mirror that reflects it.”

-From Valerie Marie Arvidson’s “Sisters” in Blunderbuss Magazine

So to the students at Dartmouth—and to the rest of us involved in protest politics—when “allies” chastise you for choosing a too public venue for protest, or for behaving in a manner they call obnoxious or (that favorite slur of the moderate) alienating, remember that being courteous and being effective aren’t necessarily compatible. You know what’s a graver sin than being rude? Not using every tool at your disposal to fight for what’s right.

Travis Mushett, Get Rude: In Praise of Obnoxious and Annoying Activism (via lagertha-lodbrok)

(via callingoutbigotry)

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From Drew Lerman’s “A Walk Thru Park Slope” in Blunderbuss Magazine

From Drew Lerman’s “A Walk Thru Park Slope” in Blunderbuss Magazine

The immediate effect of [the stunning rise in student debt in recent years] was to destroy much of what was most valuable in the college experience itself, which had once been the only four years of genuine freedom in an American’s life: a time to not only pursue truth, beauty, and understanding as values in themselves, but to experiment with different possibilities of life and existence. Now all of this was relentlessly subordinated to the logic of the market. Where once universities held themselves out as embodiments of the ancient ideal that the true purpose of wealth is to afford one the means and leisure to pursue knowledge and understanding of the world, now the only justification for knowledge was held to be to facilitate the pursuit of wealth. Those who insisted on treating college as anything but a calculated investment—those who, like my friend at the radical bookstore, had the temerity to wish to contribute to our understanding of the sensibilities of English Renaissance poetry despite an uncertain job market—were likely to do so at terrible personal costs.

David Graeber, The Democracy Project

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When you are in a house that is swallowed by a wolf the best thing to do is to wrap yourself in a blanket of water and set the house on fire. The fire will then spread to the wolf and the wolf, once covered in fire, will burn right on up and you will walk on out of its charred hull of a skin just fine, and with your dinner prepared, picnic style, at your feet. You will, however, no longer have a house. Also arson is illegal and I think technically this is arson.

from Sasha Fletcher’s useful instructional resource “in case you are swallowed by a wolf” now at Blunderbuss Magazine

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Launch Party TONIGHT

Tonight in the East Village, Blunderbuss comes to life IRL.

Our exceptional readers include Ian MacDougall, Leon Chang, Jessica Feldman, and Sasha Fletcher. You will also hear the poetry of Gabriella R. Tallmadge and Regina DiPerna

THERE WILL ALSO BE PARTYING. See you there!!!

7:00 pm – 9:00 pm
KGB Bar
85 E. 4th St., NYC – b/t Bowery & 2nd Ave.

More details; Facebook page.

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From Sam Alden’s new comic, “Reminders.”

From Sam Alden’s new comic, “Reminders.”