Confusion Is...

22 / recent grad / bicoastal

"I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we are reading doesn't wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for? We need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us." - Franz Kafka

Ask! / Twitter / rhiansasseen.com (blog)

My other tumblr: The Bloomsbury Group

2012.07.13

PROVEN TECHNIQUES FOR AN EMPTY DREAMSCAPE

412 LinkedIn connections. 746 Twitter followers. A profile on every social media site; a resume stuffed with a long list of internships, paid and unpaid. Sunday morning brunches; a closet filled with H&M professional wear. Sentences that begin, “During my summer co-op…”

These are the markers of success for a particular breed of ambitious youth. They are ambitious in name only; in the day-to-day business of their lives, they remain unconcerned with the content, just the image. Commerce, not creativity, rules their actions. Witness the entire career of someone like Taylor Cotter: list-filled clips and a relentless careerism aimed towards a job, any job, rather than producing a body of work that actually matters. It is telling that her apparent idols are Carrie Bradshaw and Harriet the Spy: one, a child, and the other, a grown woman characterized by her childish fixation with shoes. Both fictions, both surrounded by objects, endless objects. Joining them: the individual’s sense of self.

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