I bought Jennifer Egan’s “A Visit From the Goon Squad” for $1 at a yard sale. The sorority girl who had been the previous owner, apparently, had not deigned it worth bringing home.
Her loss.
“A Visit From the Goon Squad” released in 2010, and eventually won the Pulitzer Prize for literature. The book follows a loosely connected group of characters, jumping through time and place in order to tell a larger story about the arcs of our lives.
A longtime Vail Valley resident recently lent me a copy of Daniel Glick’s 2001 book “Powder Burn: Arson, Money and Mystery on Vail Mountain.” This eighty-year-old woman and I had just finished up a dinner at the Northside Kitchen, a local favorite in Avon, CO, just down the road from Vail.
This woman had built one of the very first houses in Avon. In the beginning, she stood alone on a plain, a modest house with a huge yard, next to the scenic Eagle River. A highway ran past, a few hundred yards away, but that was a small price to pay for the unique mix of solitude and accessibility.
Now her house is almost impossible to find, if you do not know where to look for it. It sits squashed between huge apartment complexes and hotels, shrouded by a wall of shrubbery. Beaver Creek ski resort looms above, a ski resort even more exclusive and boutique than Vail. People come and go all around. Most of them probably do not even notice her house— assume it is simply another luxury rental with an absent owner. Vail Resorts has built its empire around her, suffocating her views and her community in order to house as many impressionable young workers and incredibly rich tourists and as they can. The idea of a private plat existing in between all that artifice is laughable. I’m sure, if they could, Vail Resorts would buy her out for an exorbitant sum of money, and call it a win.
INVARIABLY, these are the words which follow the revelation that you are an English major. There is literally no other response. Society has no use for English majors other than to teach new English majors, it seems.
The rise of the Internet economy has created an entirely new use for those graduating college with liberal arts degrees. English, Communications, Journalism, and similar majors are suddenly in high demand. Why?
May is almost up, and if you’re anything like me, you’ve spent the month watching high school and college graduations go by: either in-person, or on social media. Caps, gowns and sashes flashed by in a blur— and the requisite binge drinking which soothes the thought of the future from the fresh graduate’s mind sloshed a veneer of fun over the whole thing.
Under the jubilation: the common, slinking, cultural understanding that the degree is going to be more of a burden than a boon, at least for the first half-decade or so. Student loans, a lack of experience and an eminently poor job market all linger on the sides of the millennial consciousness.
“I Just Graduated, Now What?” is the question du jour.
No one I know, except the engineers, is excited about graduation. Even they are subdued, but then again: they are engineers.
Potter was well-known in the extreme sports community for his daring and seeming invulnerability to catching the wrong side of the term “calculated risk.” Alongside the likes of Alex Honnold, Potter was one of five athletes who had their Clif Bar sponsorship revoked because the brand was afraid that these athletes were going to kill themselves.
thisisyouth 