Word: uncool
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...Harvard, she is free of such obstacles. Brown says she’s captivated by her studies as a Biochemistry concentrator, and she delights in an atmosphere in which “it’s not uncool to talk about academic things.” After years of explaining concepts to her peers in Durango, Brown says, “It’s so wonderful to learn from other people. I can communicate with them on such a high level...
...Nabil would never put a Saddam Hussein poster in his bedroom: that would be way uncool for a hip teenager. But not long ago, he'd have thought it uncool even to praise Saddam. "Among my friends, talking about politics was considered stupid, a waste of time," he says. "But now everybody talks about Saddam, and we all think he's tough." Tough like Buffy? "Yeah," Nabil laughs. "Tough like Buffy." Only in this case, it's the vampire he admires, not the slayer...
...bumblebee blundering of Will's thoughts (he compares the workings of his brain to "a toddler in a room full of new guests"); and the stream-water clarity of his descriptions (with the sentence "His socks were white and Van Horned up around his calves," a reference to chronically uncool NBA player Keith Van Horn, Eggers may have enriched the English language by a verb). At their best, Will and Hand, like Vladimir and Estragon, have genuine existential pathos; at their worst they're a little jejune, a pair of Holden Caulfields railing at the phonies. Critics have tarred Eggers...
...those whose lives are completely ordinary. In the former category are writers like David Sedaris, to whom fate hands interesting twists--he is gay, he has a wacky family, he lives in Paris--all of which then become comic material. Dan Zevin, author of The Day I Turned Uncool: Confessions of a Reluctant Grown-up, is firmly in the latter category. His bread and butter is the Seinfeld-ian nothingness of everyday life...
...funny stuff, but The Day I Turned Uncool grates a bit after 150 pages. Sedaris' work has a melancholy undertone that keeps it from cloying, and he has the gift of being funny even when he has something serious to say. Zevin is hilarious when he is humiliating himself, like the time he accidentally invites a pornographer to address his journalism class, but much less so in his philosophical moments, when he urges us to accept the inevitability of growing up. In fact, perhaps he shouldn't grow up at all. He's at his funniest when he's acting...