Failures of Kindness

I’m reading a book of short stories by George Saunders. The librarian that checked it out for me waxed effusive about Saunders. His stories are good, although they fall short of another book of short stories I just finished by Ottessa Moshfegh.

I picked up Moshfegh’s book because I got a Google alert and discovered something she shared about Mark in an interview for Vulture, including one of his 50-books-in-a-year as one of 10 works she’d take with her to a desert island. I’d never read anything by her. She was in his MFA cohort at Brown:

We lost this brave genius last year, and the books he gifted us while he lived are so wonderfully strange and honest and beautiful, I can’t believe he even existed. He was more than a poet or performance artist — Baumer’s life itself was a work of art. He was truly radical, and the most openhearted, unjaded human I’ve ever met.

That was kind of her. Continue reading

The Direction of Kindness

Kindness happens one act at a time.

Kindness happens one act at a time.

We’re now past graduation season and college grads are working (hopefully) or at least enjoying their final summer before entering the real world.

There are certain types of graduation speeches that receive accolades and some of them become enshrined. This one, just discovered by this writer at The New York Times, is by George Saunders. By Saunders’ own admission, it riffs on a common theme—the theme here being kindness and living a life that’s kinder and gentler to others. Continue reading