Eventually, inevitably, the anti-aging industry and the athletic performance industry intertwined, with weird results. Now, HGH and testosterone are no longer solely the tools of bodybuilders, MLB sluggers and NFL linemen, but also of CEOs, bankers and life hackers. Now, science and salesmanship can be hard to separate; outcomes are murky—enhancing performance doesn’t necessarily mean extending longevity—and those people with time, money and privilege have a huge head start on the rest.
Now, we live in an era of possibility. Even if many of us don’t yet know it.
Earlier this year, I taught Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis to groups of second-year English students. I was inspired by the conversations born from the text, covering such diverse areas as the family, the nonhuman, and ideas of care. But across all the groups I taught, we also talked a lot about work. We discussed how, in the immediate aftermath of his awakening to discover his body altered, Gregor Samsa finds himself still tired, and tries to go back to sleep. When he has difficulty getting comfortable in his bug body, he begins to decry a plethora of mundane stresses from his job as a traveling salesman. These did not seem to be the thoughts of a person who has undergone some mysterious supernatural change, but rather those that many of us have when our alarm goes off first thing in the morning and we must head off to our jobs. Tired, stressed, bored.
“The land here eats everything,” thinks the narrator of The Lady with the Big Head Chronicle, the first story of Glorious Frazzled Beings, longlisted for the 2021 Giller Prize. “There are after all so many intact spirits roaming, and they are hungry for knowing.”
The characters in Angelique Lalonde’s debut collection, the only story collection on this year’s Giller Prize shortlist, are hungry for knowing, too: they want to understand their mothers, their grocery lists, their guilt over killing flies, the disappearing enchanted town they discovered in the woods. They are struggling, lonely, yearning, and frazzled— that scattered, delirious, deeply maternal state of mind, which Lalonde excavates in inventive, rhapsodic prose.
But if you were the kind of band that earned its cred giving the finger to corporate suits, how were you supposed to navigate shaking their hand for your shot at rock stardom?
That's the question at the center of the new book Sellout: The Major Label Feeding Frenzy That Swept Punk, Emo, and Hardcore 1994 - 2007 from music writer Dan Ozzi. The book uses the major label debuts of 11 bands to examine a music industry in flux, fans feeling betrayed, and bands just trying to navigate the machine. "I wanted to know, what happens to the real people," says Ozzi. "Is it worth it?"